Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I use Excalidraw to manage my diagrams for my blog

blog.lysk.tech

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 120 posts

Re: I use Excalidraw to manage my diagrams for my blog

#11

Post by mi_lk »

wdroz wrote: post #5

You can also bootstrap your initial schema with LLMs with the excalidraw MCP "app" [0]. But MCP "apps"[1] are quite new and not very well supported yet. [0] -- https://github.com/excalidraw/excalidraw-mcp [1] -- https://modelcontextprotocol.io/extensions/apps/overview

I didn't have good experience with excalidraw-mcp when it first came out a month ago; the Claude-generated diagrams were too raw/unpolished. I'm sticking to mermaid for now but I'm interested in hearing how people make exclidraw-mcp work for them

Re: I use Excalidraw to manage my diagrams for my blog

#12

Post by jstanley »

postatic wrote: post #9
emil-lp wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently Excalidraw is An open source virtual hand-drawn style whiteboard. Collaborative and end-to-end encrypted. https://github.com/excalidraw/excalidraw

I love excalidraw, but don't need the excalidraw+. But Excalidraw open source is the frontend only, which means I have to delete my drawings each time. So I built the backend so I can create many canvases. https://drawx.ossy.dev

Your site makes me make an account before I can use it, whereas excalidraw.com doesn't, and also excalidraw.com seems to save my drawing just fine? I closed a tab and reopened it and my drawing was still there, presumably from localStorage.

The three-lines-menu also has a "Save to..." option that lets you create a sharable link or save to your local disk.

Re: I use Excalidraw to manage my diagrams for my blog

#13

Post by fabbbbb »

petepete wrote: post #7
emil-lp wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently Excalidraw is An open source virtual hand-drawn style whiteboard. Collaborative and end-to-end encrypted. https://github.com/excalidraw/excalidraw

I use Excalidraw extensively at work. For me, it's really close to perfection. It has an excellent UI, selections work way better than Lucid or Figma etc, the sketchy look makes it clear designs are rough and not blueprints, it's private and loads instantly. The one negative is that it's a pain to get the multiplayer self-hosted version running.

I was surprised about that, too. Tried a bit but found very few sources online.

A self-hosted version with storage (multiplayer) plus any Claude access would be a killer setup for team planning etc and let us drop Miro.

Re: I use Excalidraw to manage my diagrams for my blog

#15

Post by elric »

darshanmakwana wrote: post #10

I simply just draw in excalidraw and take a ss and past it in my obsidian note, I have a setup that automatically parses posts from my vault and then pushes them to my site

I use the Obsidian Excalidraw plugin, means I can add diagrams to notes without leaving Obsidian.

Re: I use Excalidraw to manage my diagrams for my blog

#17

Post by blahlabs »

jstanley wrote: post #12
postatic wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love excalidraw, but don't need the excalidraw+. But Excalidraw open source is the frontend only, which means I have to delete my drawings each time. So I built the backend so I can create many canvases. https://drawx.ossy.dev

Your site makes me make an account before I can use it, whereas excalidraw.com doesn't, and also excalidraw.com seems to save my drawing just fine? I closed a tab and reopened it and my drawing was still there, presumably from localStorage. The three-lines-menu also has a "Save to..." option that lets you create a sharable link or save to your local disk.

You can also embed the excalidraw drawing in the exported image. So you can drag/drop the exorted image back into excalidraw and edit it later.

Re: I use Excalidraw to manage my diagrams for my blog

#18

Post by hhh »

dewey wrote: post #16

Everyone does that these days and they are becoming AI tells like the em-dash or the blue-glow of the early AI generated images that everyone added to their blog posts.

AI can generate mermaid diagrams, not excalidraw. If you use the mermaid to excalidraw, i guess it can be, but it just looks like a mermaid diagram then and not an excalidraw.

Re: I use Excalidraw to manage my diagrams for my blog

#19

Post by darshanmakwana »

elric wrote: post #15
darshanmakwana wrote: post #10

I simply just draw in excalidraw and take a ss and past it in my obsidian note, I have a setup that automatically parses posts from my vault and then pushes them to my site

I use the Obsidian Excalidraw plugin, means I can add diagrams to notes without leaving Obsidian.

Yeah I use that plugin too. I was just referencing it in relation to how I setup my blog[1]

[1]: https://darshanmakwana412.github.io/2026/03/a-system-of-jour...

Re: I use Excalidraw to manage my diagrams for my blog

#20

Post by ndezt »

petepete wrote: post #7
emil-lp wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently Excalidraw is An open source virtual hand-drawn style whiteboard. Collaborative and end-to-end encrypted. https://github.com/excalidraw/excalidraw

I use Excalidraw extensively at work. For me, it's really close to perfection. It has an excellent UI, selections work way better than Lucid or Figma etc, the sketchy look makes it clear designs are rough and not blueprints, it's private and loads instantly. The one negative is that it's a pain to get the multiplayer self-hosted version running.

Yeah, Excalidraw is really nice diagramming tools that I frequently used as well on my day-to-day works.

For the self-host, finally I build the solution myself so I can self-host Excalidraw and several other plaintext diagramming format while still able to working with my peers using realtime collaboration.

I open sourced it on https://github.com/andes90/collabmd, and if you want to try you can play around with the demo on https://demo.collabmd.app

Post reply on HN