excalidraw VS draw.io

ExcaliDraw - https://excalidraw.com/

ExcaliDraw

However, Notion and Obsidian can only help you write documentation. Well, how about some visuals? Let's talk about Excalidraw.

Fun fact: I used GA in Excalidraw, and it's still powering some of the interactions! https://github.com/excalidraw/excalidraw/blob/master/package...

I was happy to find out recently that there is a way to make Mermaid diagrams WYSIWYG / drag and drop editable that the open source https://excalidraw.com has and did I mention it's open source!? With a LLM, you can go full loop back to Mermaid again after a few rounds of manual editing. "What a time to be alive!"

I'm working on a personal project and found myself looking for an alternative to Postman/Insomnia this morning. This made me realize i've been using the same tools for so long for work (mobile development, finance) that this project may be a good time to try out some new things.

Here are a few tools that i've been using lately that I really enjoy:

https://pocketbase.io/ - A dead-simple self-hosted firebase/supabase-like "backend in a box" using golang and sqlite. So far i've been really impressed. I've gone the route of extending the base offering with more go code and am really enjoying the experience.

https://excalidraw.com/ - An open source whiteboarding tool. Slick to use and after learning some keybinds I've gotten pretty fast at throwing together diagrams to explain things to people on my team. The killer piece though is that the filetype is just json, so I can source control my diagrams. Even better, their "export to png" function has a box to embed the json data _into_ the png, allowing me to slap the diagram in places that only accept images (think confluence) and still be able to change the diagram later if needed. 10/10.

https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/ - Gitlab's CI/CD toolset is really impressive, and I've gotten really intimate with it's deeper features over the past year. I'd be curious though to hear from someone who's familiar with it vs it's competitors.

At first I thought this was drawio: https://www.drawio.com/ with which you can generate a schema diagram from SQL. Is this the other way around.

For anyone who is willing to use a webapp, I like drawio[0]. You can download locally[1] and self host (I just use the python webserver).

While finding the Github, I see they now actually package an Electron application, so that is probably worth exploring[2].

[0] https://www.drawio.com/

[1] https://github.com/jgraph/drawio

[2] https://github.com/jgraph/drawio-desktop

draw.io works nicely for flowcharts and other types of diagrams.

:

  The source code authored by us in this repo is

Another way that you can leverage the power of ChatGPT and mermaid is when you are using a software designing tool such as Draw.io and you want to skip the tedious task of creating a diagram from scratch and want to get a push at the begging and save your time for the creative part of the diagram.

There are also mockups with more features, so ignore weird UI at first.

[1]: https://www.drawio.com

> Additional minified JavaScript files and Java libraries are used in this project. All of the licenses are deemed compatible with the Apache 2.0, nothing is GPL or AGPL, due dilgence is performed on all third-party code.

Here's an issue that was opened:

https://github.com/jgraph/drawio/issues/3782

> The file for converting the mermaid code to mxgaph xml is available only in minified version. the unminified version "mermaid2drawio.js" is missing. Please include that.

Answer:

> We do not supply the source to that file.

With such phrasing, for now, I'll consider drawio proprietary with some parts in Apache 2 (even if it's actually the majority of the code).

It might be possible to have a fork with some optional features related to these non provided files removed, if by luck no critical feature is impacted.

Specifically I've been working on an incremental game and I've been using https://www.drawio.com/ to help me plan out what I want the progression of features/unlocks to be as the player progresses through the game, what pre-requirements/events are for each feature/unlock, etc.