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Posted by mlysk 14 hours ago

I use Excalidraw to manage my diagrams for my blog(blog.lysk.tech)
246 points | 99 commentspage 3
irl_zebra 8 hours ago|
Love Excalidraw. Used it for decades now, but reach for more powerful tools pretty often as I hit its limits. I'm not asking for the world, but some basics like being able to bold or italicize text would help out a lot.
gilbetron 4 hours ago||
Decades? Wasn't it created in 2020?
alunchbox 8 hours ago||
YES YES YES! Excalidraw is amazing, I recently embedded it into my vibe coded project to add version control integration with it. Honestly one of highest quality tools I've used for my workflow, does what it needs to do and doesn't get in your way.
d4rkp4ttern 10 hours ago||
Another option I use open is to ask the code-agent to make a diagram using Tikz (as a .tex file), which can then be converted to pdf/png.

But in general AI-diagramming is still unsolved; needs several iterations to get rid of wonky/wrong arrows, misplaced boxes, misplaced text etc.

jillesvangurp 9 hours ago|
I've always liked umlet and umletino (web version) for a nice mix of drag and drop and edit by text editor. In the absence of good enough layout algorithms, the ability to manually drag things to the right place is kind of essential. The resulting diagrams are not so pretty of course.

I have tried a lot of tools in this space. If it comes out looking alright, that's usually because it was so simple that it didn't actually need a diagram. Anything with a bit of non trivial structure seems to quickly escalate with essentially no good options other then esoteric hacks with styling to make it look any good.

This seems to be a thing where you can have pretty automated layouts, complex diagrams, or correct diagrams and can only have two out of three.

Which means that almost 100% of my use cases for these tools never really work for me unless I sit down and grab some old school drawing tool (or just give up on the whole notion, which is much more likely). If it was trivial, I wouldn't bother making a diagram. These tools seem only usable for stuff where diagrams were overkill to begin with. I saw no examples on the linked article (and the rest of the site; I browsed the top few recent articles) to really counter this.

tobiu 10 hours ago||
nice one!
johspaeth 10 hours ago||
Uh, that’s a nice approach.
tom1337890 8 hours ago|
[dead]
rykuno 8 hours ago|
Brand new account minutes ago and first post advertising. Awesome.
tom1337890 5 hours ago||
Well, no ads, just saying. I am using this myself.

I use excalidraw a lot and it's hard to manage different drawings. So the fact that each drawing is one note is great.

Further, publishing the drawing on a hosted instance gives you a permalink to it, so you would actually never need to export a drawing and would have a live reference.

I think this integration is really useful.

And yes, I did not find my old account, so I created a new one :-)