Excalidraw Blog
blog.excalidraw.com · Company blog · on HN since 2020
The Excalidraw team writes about building its open-source browser whiteboard, covering encryption, collaboration, design decisions and project history.
What HN saysHN commenters point to it for how Excalidraw does end-to-end encryption and peer-to-peer collaboration, and call the posts interesting and informative.
16HN people shared it
6linked it in comments
11stories submitted
544story points
3 years agolast shared
2020people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1End-to-end encryption in the browser5 people · 192 points · first shared 2020 · 107 comments on HN
- 2Excalidraw+3 people · 180 points · first shared 2021 · 31 comments on HN
- 3Building Excalidraw's P2P Collaboration Feature2 people · 7 points · first shared 2020 · 1 comments on HN
- 4Reflections on Excalidraw (2020)2 people · 4 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 5One Year of Excalidraw1 people · 154 points · first shared 2021 · 19 comments on HN
- 6Deprecating Excalidraw Electron in favor of the Web version1 people · 5 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 7Rethinking the Component API1 people · 1 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
- 8Excalidraw – Three for Three1 people · 1 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 9Browser fs access1 people · first shared 2022
- 10Homepage1 people · first shared 2023
What HN people wrote when they linked it
Terretta · 2023-08-20
Plug for Excalidraw:
https://excalidraw.com/
https://blog.excalidraw.com/
Which, FWIW, supports Apple Pencil and iPad quite well since 2022:
https://twitter.com/excalidraw/status/1491044642493992960
As well as a seemingly evergreen release of the Obsidian plugin that gets people Doge levels of Such Wow:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/s58d2o/just_discovered_th…
Video walkthrough here:
https://github.com/zsviczian/obsidian-excalidraw-plugin
The team based real time collaboration in Excalidraw+ is just fantastic. Glad to have a way to compensate the author:
https://blog.excalidraw.com/introducing-excalidraw-plus/
mfester · 2022-05-09
The starting point for this work is really: how can we take what exists (text files) and make it work in a CRDT setting, without tainting the data in any ways. For instance, if you decide to host your data on Git, we want the repo to look exactly the same as if it was a regular code project. We don't look to add another standard on top of existing ones – for instance, we are not aiming to enable "CRDT version history" in the file system. This could of course constitute future work (something similar to a .git folder – CRDTs can be stored efficiently). But our main goal here is to show that browser apps have a way to free their data from the tool, something Excalidraw started doing [1], and which was a source of inspiration to us.
[1] https://blog.excalidraw.com/browser-fs-access/
keyle · 2021-01-05
It's okish to implement, here is an example...
https://blog.excalidraw.com/end-to-end-encryption/
The harder part is probably from a UX sense, how do you make sure people understand that the key is important, and how do you or not store it on their computer.
EwanToo · 2020-06-15
This blog post on their multi-user support is pretty interesting
https://blog.excalidraw.com/building-excalidraw-p2p-collaboration-feat…
ejstronge · 2020-03-23
More information about the project (I’m unaffiliated, just wanted to learn more!) https://blog.excalidraw.com/reflections-on-excalidraw/
vjeux · 2020-03-23
Super excited to see that excalidraw made the front page! We published an article yesterday explaining how the end to end encryption works when sharing a link: https://blog.excalidraw.com/end-to-end-encryption/