tldraw VS core

You might want to check out tldraw - project to render react on canvas and whiteboard application built on it. And subscribe to Steve Ruiz as he writes about such (and more complex freehand) drawings.

tldraw.com — Free open source white-boarding and diagramming tool with features such as smart arrows, snapping, sticky notes, and SVG export. Multiplayer mode for collaborative editing. Free official VS Code extension available as well.

I especially like tldraw.com; which is a simple (opensource) whiteboard where you can copy-paste/move/resize images. It’s perfect. Except that…. You cannot (at least, for now) attach datas to those images (like a link). I’ve been told that it should support videos soon, but that’s not the case for now.

Hey, author here! Glad folks are enjoying this.

A few notes:

- I post a _lot_ about tldraw on Twitter. If you're curious about how this came together, or want to follow along as we ship new features, check out my timeline (https://twitter.com/steveruizok).

- The whole tldraw project is MIT licensed and open source (https://github.com/tldraw). And it's still in development! If you'd like to contribute, join the Discord channel (https://discord.gg/SBBEVCA4PG) or drop by the repo (https://github.com/tldraw/tldraw).

- The multiplayer is using a pre-release version of Liveblocks (https://liveblocks.io/)—and honestly isn't using it in a very clever way—and so can have some desync issues. Consider this part of the app an early beta.

- We also ship a Visual Studio Code extension that lets you use tldraw inside of VS Code! (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=tldraw-o...)

A little more about the project itself:

The tldraw project has a few different layers.

At the bottom, there is a renderer named @tldraw/core (https://github.com/tldraw/core) that is essentially a "put React components on a canvas UI" engine. You give it a data model along with a set of utilities to interpret that data model. Simple but very fast, very flexible, and packed with helpers for building these kinds of apps. It's already being used for some pretty ambitious projects apart from tldraw itself.

The main library, @tldraw/tldraw (https://github.com/tldraw/core), exports the whole tldraw "app" as a React component named . This component can be embedded in any React project. It can be controlled either by props or by its own API (ie `app.selectAll().duplicate()`).

The website is a very thin Next.js app that embeds the component.

There are also a few other libraries: @tldraw/vec for the vector math and @tldraw/intersect for intersections. If you like to work on these kinds of projects, definitely bookmark those libraries! They contain a lot of useful code.

As for its development, I've taken off a few months between jobs to work on this full time. Until now, the site has been accessible only to my Github sponsors, but it's now free and open to everyone. If If you'd like to support the project's continued development, you can sponsor me here: https://github.com/sponsors/steveruizok.

I'll answer questions here but if you want to contact me directly, my DMs are open @steveruizok.