draw
Excalidraw, local-first, yours.
A native-feel desktop wrapper around Excalidraw. Files live on your machine as plain .excalidraw files. Continuous autosave, full offline support, signed for macOS.
Draw is what happens when your favorite whiteboard tool stops asking you to log in. It wraps Excalidraw in a native shell, files on disk, with the kind of thoughtful chrome you usually only get in a paid app.
It exists because diagrams are notes, and notes belong to you. The cloud is great until it isn't. With Draw, your sketches outlive any company.
Whiteboards should outlive trends. Yours should outlive ours.
— Workbench notes
The small
stuff.
The decisions you don't see in screenshots — but feel in the using.
- 01
A folder is a project
Drawings live as plain .excalidraw files under ~/Library/Application Support/ink.wolves.draw/drawings. The sidebar mirrors the folder tree; rename, move and nest from inside the app.
- 02
Continuous autosave
Every change is debounced to disk in 500ms. Atomic writes via a .tmp companion file — pull the plug mid-stroke and the file you had a second ago is the file you reopen.
- 03
In-app auto-updater
Signed, notarized macOS builds via GitHub Actions, with a Tauri minisign updater that checks 4 seconds after launch. The app never auto-restarts; you click RESTART when you're ready.
- 04
Get out of the way
Cmd + \ collapses the sidebar so the canvas takes the whole screen. Native title-bar overlay, no extraneous chrome — the cursor is the only thing left.
Built with
Boring tech, used carefully. The sharp edges go in the design, not the stack.