excalidraw VS drawio-desktop

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.

Sketch easy and go back to work...

https://excalidraw.com/

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

You can also get it for desktop. It's the same web app but I like to have it installed.

I like excalidraw for live discussions but if I want to make more detailed or better looking diagrams, I really enjoy these two tools:

- For drag-and-drop/WYSIWYG, I really like DrawIO. They have a web version https://app.diagrams.net/ but I strongly recommend the desktop version https://github.com/jgraph/drawio-desktop/releases/

- For text-as-diagram, I think Mermaid wins this by default since GitHub added markdown support for these: https://mermaid.live/ (This was github's announcement https://github.blog/2022-02-14-include-diagrams-markdown-fil... )

Protip: get draw.io if you want to edit that file. Or just use the online https://www.drawio.com/ (previously diagram.net?)

LibreOffice Writer with Drawio-desktop (and Inkscape if it needs complex editing), if LibreOffice Writer is not enough you can try Scribus.

This is hard to understand. Can you make a diagram of your network, or a flowchart? I use this software https://www.diagrams.net/

Gibt es auch als Desktop App.

Perhaps diagrams.net (click 'more shapes' to add the electrical symbols). There is also yEd. It has logic gates, but I don't know if it has electrical components. Of course KiCAD is specifically designed for circuits, but that might not fit your application.

I use this software: https://www.diagrams.net/