Deprecating Excalidraw Electron in favor of the Web version

December 17, 2020, by tomayac

On the Excalidraw project, we have decided to deprecate Excalidraw Desktop, an Electron wrapper for Excalidraw, in favor of the Web version that you can—and always could—find at excalidraw.com. After a careful analysis, we have decided that Progressive Web App (PWA) is the future we want to build upon. Read on to learn more about our rationale.

Reading and writing files and directories with the browser-nativefs library

December 09, 2020, by tomayac

Browsers have been able to deal with files and directories for a long time. The File API provides features for representing file objects in web applications, as well as programmatically selecting them and accessing their data. The moment you look closer, though, all that glitters is not gold.

Open Colors

November 10, 2020, by Lipis

One of the qualities of Excalidraw is its simplicity. Even though we have the option to use any color of the spectrum, we have decided to limit our palette to a curated set of 15 colors in three different shades.

Enabling Translations

April 16, 2020, by Lipis

From the early days people asked for Excalidraw to be translated to other languages. Translation infrastructure and community maintenance have historically been a pain to maintain. Thankfully, with projects like Crowdin and i18next-browser-languagedetector, Excalidraw is now translated in 20 languages and the whole process has been very low maintenance.

Building Excalidraw's P2P Collaboration Feature

March 29, 2020, by idlewinn

Excalidraw is a whiteboard tool that lets you easily sketch diagrams that have a hand-drawn feel to them. As tech companies started to institute mandatory work from home policies due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we realized that Excalidraw could be the perfect substitute for the whiteboard that is usually required for systems design interviews.

Rethinking Virtual Whiteboard

March 28, 2020, by vjeux

Excalidraw started as a virtual tool to draw diagrams but a lot of people started using it to replace physical whiteboards. In this post we’ll walk through many aspects of physical whiteboards that do not make sense to translate as is in the virtual world.

End-to-End Encryption in the Browser

March 21, 2020, by vjeux

Excalidraw is a whiteboard tool that lets you easily sketch diagrams that have a hand-drawn feel to them. It is very handy to dump your thoughts many of which are sensitive: designs for new features not yet released, interview questions, org charts…

Reflections on Excalidraw

January 15, 2020, by vjeux

On January 1st I started building a little tool that lets you create diagrams that look like they are hand-written. That whole project exploded and in two weeks it got 12k unique active users, 1.5k stars on GitHub and 26 contributors on GitHub (who produced real code, we don’t have any docs). If you want to play with it, go to excalidraw.com.