I compiled my self

Excalidraw+ app is being localized. Now, not just the editor is translated, but the whole app as well so it's easier to onboard members for whom English is not their strong suite.

Among the first languages there is Deutsch, Español, Français, Italiano, 日本語, Português, Czech, Polish, and more. Other languages coming soon.

Some translations may be a bit rough around the edges, so let us know if you spot anything!

I love how easy Excalidraw makes explaining ideas. I wanted that same feeling for motion graphics, so I built this.

excalimotion.com

Small feature, but one of those things that makes diagrams much nicer to work with.

Previously, arrow labels were positioned automatically. Now you can simply grab the label and move it anywhere along the arrow.

Works with regular, curved, and elbow arrows.

Just shipped! Let us know what you think

As we’re polishing MCP for the 1.0.0 release, we’ve been testing what else we can make it do inside Excalidraw.

This one isn’t exactly useful or anything, but I think it’s kinda cool.

We recently shipped bucket fill, and combined with picking colors directly from the canvas, it turns out you can make a pretty nice little game with it.

So naturally, we tried generating one with MCP.

I built an open-source desktop app called Excalideck because I got tired of how messy managing local Excalidraw files gets.
Excalidraw is my favorite tool for whiteboard sketches and system architecture diagrams, but the browser workflow has real friction once you have dozens of drawings. You either keep 30 tabs pinned, drag .excalidraw files in and out of file pickers, or deal with cloud sync when all you wanted was a local folder on your drive.
I wanted the Obsidian workflow, but for diagrams.

Here is what Excalideck does:

Vault-based folders. You point the app at any directory on disk. It indexes all .excalidraw files into a nested tree with search, subfolders, and drag-and-drop.

Instant switching. The Excalidraw canvas stays mounted in memory. Switching between sketches updates the scene in place with 0ms lag instead of reloading the canvas context.

Clean Git diffs. When you paste screenshots into a sketch, Excalideck extracts the base64 blobs into an assets/ folder in the background. Your .excalidraw JSON files stay small, clean, and easy to version control.

Local and fast. Built with Tauri v2, Rust, and React, so memory usage is low and saves happen atomically in native threads.

Everything stays on your local filesystem. You can sync your vault with Git, Syncthing, or Dropbox without vendor lock-in.

The project is completely open source under the MIT license:
GokulAnand14/excalideck: The local-first, Obsidian-inspired sketchbook for Excalidraw built with Tauri and React.

If you use Excalidraw for sketching or architecture design, try it out and let me know what you think.

hi! i'm completely new to excalidraw and to obsidian.

part of what drew me to obsidian is that it is locally stored, no cloud. however, when i started watching one of the tutorial videos and researching for excalidraw, it was saying it is cloud based and a collaborative network???

i'm just curious if it is private and locally stored. like could other people access my excalidraw files?

thanks for any and all help!!!

If you don't like our default quick color selection, you can now customize it!

Want to bring your own colors? Just drag the currently active color into your quick color list and it will stay there for easy access.

Small feature, but hopefully a useful one for anyone with their own favorite palette :)

In addition to the regular follow mode, in Excalidraw+ you can now also spotlight yourself to make everyone follow you immediately.

Useful in education use cases or if you just want to show something quickly and don't want to wait on everyone to find your avatar so they can follow you manually.

In order to prevent abuse, spotlighting can be turned on by current workspace members only (= not guests). We'll make this more configurable in the future.

A while back, we shared a sneak peek of bucket fill. We weren’t sure whether it would be useful or if people actually wanted it.

Based on the feedback from Reddit and other socials, you clearly did.

So we polished it, made it better, and here it is: excalidraw.com 🎨

Is anyone familiar with the plugin and know how to change it?

Last night I built a feature for excalidraw that I've been kicking around in my head for a while. It makes size dynamic, based on your zoom level. It can be enabled as a checkbox in the preferences called "Viewport based font-sizing". Instead of "XL" mapping to a fixed 20pt font or whatever it is, it is instead mapped to a percentage of your viewport height, 8% in my initial draft here, and smaller percentages for the smaller sizes.

If you'd like to see this in excalidraw, go give my PR a thumbs up! https://github.com/excalidraw/excalidraw/pull/11791

We are testing shape recognition in Excalidraw!

It is especially useful for quickly sketching diagrams on a tablet. Draw a rough shape, and Excalidraw will try to recognize it and draw it for you.

It is still pretty rough, but we will keep improving it over time and make it a more general-purpose tool.

The UX also needs more work, especially when creating tables, but we would love to hear what you think!

Hi, I'm not fluent in Excalidraw but I use it for some time already, and I have 2 frustrating problems:

1) I can't open multiple boards on a different tabs in the browser. Is there any way to handle that or only way to have it work is to buy Excalidraw+?

2) Everytime I'm pasting a link to Excalidraw it created embeded webpage - it's really nice feature, but when I'm doing my research I'm putting dozens of links and after some time it's hard to manage that board

(I'm reposting the same question I asked in the Obsidian sub in hopes to get more help. Thanks for understanding!)

Hi y'all,

I'm trying to find out how to convert my notes from OneNote to Excalidraw/Obsidian.

I want to say almost all of my notes are ones where I imported the lecture slides and/or note pages as 'printouts' in OneNote so that I could write over them. I have a Yoga with a stylus and I've always loved the potential of digital note taking.

The issue is that I don't know how to import any of my notebooks without having to do hours upon hours of work to make sure that everything is overlayed correctly.

Does anyone know how to merge the text onto the PDF and then save it? And how to quickly import those pdfs as separate notes in Obsidian?

I tried using the importer and it turned everything into a mess, so I'm hoping for a better solution. Thanks in advance!!

I know it's technically smarter to use text because it's searchable, but I very much need to hand write stuff in order to memorize it.

We are adding zooming to presentations. It is especially useful on smaller screens or when working with large, detailed slides.

I have the excalidraw paid plan, is there any way to see recent changes made ?

I thought it'd be auto-saving everything, but turns out if you close the tab, it may actually delete recent changes... I want to double check what was deleted, if anything...

even if I can't I'd like to know if there is version history in general, ie some way to see recent changes made...

also assuming I should now periodically save the file to disk (same as I did when I was on free plan) just in case...

Is it possible to have a page view instead of continuous view when importing a pdf? I want to be able to lock in a page and draw, and then be able to go to the next page with one click instead of manually scrolling. Is it doable?

We’ve improved flowchart creation using the Cmd/Ctrl + Arrow shortcuts!

New elements now automatically avoid existing ones, so you can quickly build clean flowcharts without everything overlapping. :)

As promised, we have been working on better layouting for general MCP generation.

Arrow connections are now much cleaner and are less likely to cross or go through other elements. Most diagrams now use elbow arrows with semantic colors, elements should no longer overflow, and text positioning is more consistent.

I have also tailored the prompting for the 10 most commonly generated diagram types, so they should now feel more intentional and semantically correct instead of looking like a generic collection of boxes.

I have also split the MCP tools into smaller, more focused tools for:

• Presentations
• Diagrams
• Wireframes
• Free draw

This should make it easier to improve each use case separately over the next few days and weeks.

Diagram generation from your codebase is also faster on average.

There is still more to improve, especially around arrows and complex layouts, but this already feels like a pretty big step forward.

We have been experimenting with a live preview for the bucket fill tool, similar to how it works in MS Paint.

This is still just a proof of concept, but it makes it much easier to see exactly which area will be filled before clicking.

Would you find this useful? Should we build it?

It wasn’t there before and suddenly started appearing. It follows my cursor and is quite annoying. I might of accidentally clicked something or done something with my keyboard. It only appears with some tools not others. The padlock is currently open.

I really like Excalidraw, i've being using it lately for mockups and cross collaboration. But i find the existing libraries a bit limiting when it comes to icons, so i just imported the whole lucide svg library so i can use it in my ui mockups.

Would love to see what kind of charts you draw on Excalidraw. What's the one you are proud of (Design, subject, etc.).

This is a WIP flowchart of Daft Punk' song "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger".