The latest version of #Excalidraw looks like it is starting to become a true open alternative to #Miro for collaborative sketching and sticky notes sessions.
Plenty cool features, #FOSS, self-hostable, stores stuff locally / syncs encrypted, save & export, etc.
Excalidraw is the best way to bring freehand sketching and diagramming to Obsidian, helping with certain workflows where you're mocking up figures along with your Markdown notes.
Only issue is it gets miserably slow after you have, oh, a couple hundred objects or so. This is in Obsidian, so the extra plugin layer may be part of the slowdown. You can't really use it for freehand notetaking because of that.
See the two screenshots. If the curved lines have a bunch of 'curve points' you need to adjust them all after scaling. It is likely not easy to make them route appropriately, so I accept that this is a necessity.
Wrt to arrowhead-less line, I found that when the line was originally an arrowed one from the top menu, then it will keep its arrow when clicking that option. The option next to it makes it double arrowed.
When I delightedly exclaim they are becoming like #Miro alternatives, then there's also the addition of ".. for #FOSS minded folks first of all" who are prepared to deal with some extra effort and rough edges.
For non-technical folks Miro still has an ease-of-use / intuitiveness that make e.g. a sticky notes session a frictionless breeze.
I wonder the extent to which @excalidraw can be customized to only offer the UI chrome that allows people using it to create a very specific diagram type. I.e. all menu's and toolbars have only have specific shapes and actions for one particular purpose.
It might be a collaborative sticky note session, or sequence diagramming or a concept map.
And also the extent to which a data export (json) can reflect the semantic model of that diagram.
@smallcircles@excalidraw I find tldraw has less friction for sticky notes sessions actually, if you include the friction of sso and sharing that Miro introduces, and all the extra functions (auto arrows, frames, etc) can overwhelm first time users.
That said I usually use Miro and sometimes tldraw. Mostly use tldraw if its important to me that people will be able to access the board easily.
A quick test shows that indeed for sticky note sessions tldraw is more low-friction than excalidraw.
However, I also want to use for concept map diagrams among others, having eliptical shapes. Here the text placement is completely off, making it immediately unusable.
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