excalidraw VS obsidian-excalidraw-plugin

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/

I think I have somewhere around 1k notes. Startup time is not my concern as I keep it open all the time. It seems like I bumped into https://github.com/zsviczian/obsidian-excalidraw-plugin/issu... tl;dr: Minimal theme doesn't get along with Excalidraw.

I use excalidraw for almost everything. Brilliant tool. I already mentioned it in another response in this thread but using excalidraw inside obsidian via https://github.com/zsviczian/obsidian-excalidraw-plugin has been a game changer for me.

You may already do this but if you haven’t, check out the excalidraw plugin in Obsidian: https://github.com/zsviczian/obsidian-excalidraw-plugin

Zslot has put an incredible amount of work into it and it extends excalidraw to have a lot of additional capabilities. You can also use it within Obsidian canvas for some of the flow stuff you mention but you could very likely just use the plugin.

Zslot is constantly updating it too so you get new features and updates almost every other time you open it. Amazing work done there.

And Obsidian is just awesome too :)

For those using Obsidian, the Excalidraw plugin plays really well within it.

https://github.com/zsviczian/obsidian-excalidraw-plugin

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_dis...

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/

As for community plugins, I currently have only the Excalidraw enabled on my Tab Ultra, but I haven't used it much so far.

In the end, none of these really fill the void I am looking for yet. excalidraw might do it one day, but it is far behind something like Notability, which for me is an ideal notetaking/drawing tool that almost hits the right balance of just enough tools to be creative, and not so many to be overwhelming. Being able to do the drawing/writing on an iPad is also pretty critical for me; I have not found a drawing tablet that is better for this purpose so far. The work here https://github.com/zsviczian/obsidian-excalidraw-plugin gives me hope for excalidraw, but I am not fluent enough in Typescript to make this happen anytime soon!

Is it possible to do something like this excalidraw plugin https://github.com/zsviczian/obsidian-excalidraw-plugin in Emacs?

Hi, with Obsidian Excalidraw I think you can have what you are looking for drawing…it’s a huge plugin. For spreadsheets, or you convert the tables in markdown tables or you can put the spreadsheet file into your vault and open it when needed, but atm I don’t have a valid solution on this