ExcalidrawZ: Local Native Excalidraw on macOS/iOS

Qision 117 points 26 comments November 12, 2026
github.com · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (8 comments)

jdthedisciple

did you just steal their brand name? or what am i missing

internet_points

already exists via emacs =P https://github.com/yibie/excali-mode

quentindanjou

Honestly, that looks quite good and every feature is really welcome. Kudos!

lakpahana

4yr old ? installed it via mac appstore. hope u dont steal my api keys

j2kun

From what I can tell, this project * Steals the brand name from a tool I love * Seems like it is intended to replace the original, not an extension/plugin * Smells vibe-coded (which raises the question as to its quality) I'll keep using (and paying for!) the original, thanks.

BariumBlue

Excalidraw has an NPM package!: npmjs.com/package/@excalidraw/excalidraw It is very easy in my experience to set up a local npm project that's just an empty HTML with Excalidraw inside, working fully locally - great if you're behind some firewall or similar network isolation.

kqgnkqgn

If this improves the Apple Pencil experience this could be a great improvement. Would be nice if this could be tied into Obsidian to replace the web based version somehow. The browser based ink/drawing support on iOS devices is pretty bad (and hard to fix since Apple doesn’t expose the ink APIs in JS from my understanding).

mosselman

Excalidraw is great. I created a macOS wrapper as well a while back and still went back to creating a web-based alternative instead. ExcalidrawZ looks a lot more fancy than what I had back then. I switched to web mostly for collaboration. The shared environment on the web somehow makes more sense for collaboration than the challenges of setting up sharing with local apps. You could go with a server in between, but I haven't figured out any upsides really. What I did do is customise the editor and add a bunch of features that really helped in collaborating the way I like it. So a bit of a shameless plug: https://kromdraw.com/

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