My favorite part of excalidraw over any other drawing tool is the messiness. With regular line and shape tools I end up obsessing over geometric precision and symmetry, with excalidraw it’s impossible to create “perfect” drawings, so I don’t worry about it (within reason). I wonder if this phenomenon has been named or observed in UX/game design because it’s so darn effective at making me productive when drawing.
Super happy to see they're doing well and growing - so far the best collaborative whiteboard tool I've come across.<p>A few reasons:<p>1. No account needed, just send a link.<p>2. Speedier than alternatives.<p>3. Some kind of magic making it so that quickly drawn curves come out smooth and nice looking rather than jagged.<p>4. Open source!<p>5. A good UI, when so many other projects manage to screw it up.
I'm a product designer, and I've adopted Excalidraw as a daily tool in my workflow. It's wonderful for quick iterative exploration and collaboration with the rest of my team. Like another commenter mentioned, the messiness—or rather, variability—of the lines makes it much easier to focus on the ideas, concepts, and relationships over any level of refined design.<p>I've been doing this for more than 10 years and it's the first tool that achieves the same exploratory and collaborative outcomes as an actual whiteboard.<p>I'm a happy monthly contributor!
Ok I learnt something today and that's pretty cool:<p><a href="https://blog.excalidraw.com/end-to-end-encryption/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.excalidraw.com/end-to-end-encryption/</a>
If you can't use online hosted tools (e.g. using it for work) there is a VSCode extension that embeds this which is pretty great. The latest version is actually broken but you can just install the previous one.
Is there a way to draw freehand with this tool without holding down "7" so that the shape doesn't complete when you lift the pen/stylus?
Love this tool! Discovered it just before the lockdown started and have used it as a collaboration tool in 100+ software engineering interviews since then.