Excalidraw

Excalidraw is a virtual whiteboard with a deliberately hand-drawn look. Sketches made in it read as sketches, and that is the point, since a diagram that looks provisional invites the comments a polished one quietly shuts down.

The repository holds two things. One is the editor itself, published as an npm package for embedding in your own React application. The other is the whiteboard the project hosts publicly, a minimal showcase of what the editor can do, whose source lives in the same repository.

The editor covers the drawing work.

• Infinite canvas: rectangles, circles, diamonds, arrows, lines, free drawing and an eraser, with zoom and panning.
• Arrow binding: arrows attach to shapes and carry labels, so a diagram survives being rearranged.
• Export: PNG, SVG and clipboard, plus an open JSON format saved as a single drawing file.
• Libraries and images: shape libraries and image support widen what a board can hold.
• Interface: dark mode, undo and redo, localization and customization throughout.

The hosted app adds real-time collaboration with end-to-end encryption, local-first autosaving to the browser, offline use as a progressive web app and read-only shareable links. Those features are planned as drop-in plugins for the npm package later. Installing the package needs React and React DOM. A VS Code extension exists, and the editor is already embedded in a number of well-known products.