Also, and that's personal, I think it's cute.
Excalidraw is my favourite thinking tool, and the style it produces is just the right level of limiting, disarming, and professional at the same time.
It's pretty effective to immediately communicate to folks that 'this is a concept' approach. Too many people instantly jump to conclusions about diagrams - if it's written down it must be done / fixed / formal.
I went a different route using diagram-as-code with Mermaid instead of manual drawing.
Click the AI button in the toolbar to copy the Grafly format reference. Paste it into any LLM (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini…) along with a description of the diagram you want. Copy the JSON the LLM returns. Click the Import JSON button () in the toolbar and paste it in. ”
Super user friendly as well! I don’t even understand the instructions on how to use it.
2) You claim you don't understand why people use it.
3) You claim your vibecoded substitute is more "normal" implying Excalidraw is abnormal.
1. Will you be making the source code public?
2. How to export the JSON for SCM, then re-import for updating/maintenance?
https://github.com/lnenad/grafly/
In the upper right there is an import/export button that could be used for this. It's stored in localstorage so you could also dump that to wherever you like.
edit: added link to the repo in the about modal. edit2: added import export of the entire localstorage entry on the bottom of the diagrams(left) panel.
Depends on what you want to achieve with your look. Do you want to scream professionalism, authority, and completed? Use a regular UML tool.
Want to say this is a rough draft of a few ideas? Then using UML is probably THE wrong look. And Exaclidraw should be used instead.
--- Anecdote time. According to one of my professors, they showed how the prototype will look in action, and the customers were so impressed by the smoke and mirrors prototype they wanted to start using it right away.
In the end, customer walked away because they thought they were being strung along to pay for something that was already done.
However, those who don't know mermaid have to struggle with updating my diagrams. Your approach, atleast in theory, should get us the best of both worlds. Mermaid for those who would like to and the mouse for those who don't.
This also addresses the issue that large complex diagrams can get unwieldy using Mermaid and moving things around with a mouse would fix those edge cases.