excalidraw VS vscode-drawio

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/

Open VSX allows anyone to upload an extension there with the same name and description from the VSCode marketplace, but silently change code or make new releases, maybe introducing misfeatures or malicious code. Users typically don't notice because they think they are installing "the same" extension from the VSCode marketplace.

https://github.com/hediet/vscode-drawio/issues/141

> Hi ;)

> I never published a version v999.0! It seems like you are using the unofficial open vsx marketplace (where, apparently, anyone can upload anything). You can find an issue here in this repository about it.

> Unfortunately, someone uploaded the extension in that version which blocks any further updates with that name.

> For now I believe in Microsofts vision. I don't think a secondary marketplace is good for the community - It just causes confusions like this.

> If you setup a github action that automatically publishes this extension to open vsx, please open a PR! ;)

The established practice of having random individuals set up ad-hoc mirrors of VSCode extensions is a serious security issue.

If Open VSX wants to mirror VSCode extensions, that's okay - but they should do so with an automated process that mirrors ALL extensions and do not allow for people to silently change the code of an extension.

If someone want to copy the code of an existing VSCode extension, change some things and upload it to Open VSX, that's okay too, but please fork it and clearly indicate in the description that the extension is a fork, linking to the source code of the original extension.

7. Draw.io integration

You can find it here: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=hediet.v...

Like draw.io, it is open source! (https://github.com/hediet/vscode-drawio)

See: https://github.com/hediet/vscode-drawio/issues/169#issuecomment-723645139