BetterDraw

A native macOS home for your Excalidraw drawings.
Local-first, with folders, version history, live sharing and search that understands what you drew.

_{Apple Silicon · signed and notarized by Apple}

---

Excalidraw is a great canvas and a bad filing cabinet. Every drawing is a file you download, lose, and redraw three weeks later.

BetterDraw wraps the real Excalidraw editor in a macOS app that actually keeps your work: drawings live in a sidebar, save themselves as you draw, sort into folders, keep their own version history, and can be found later by describing what was in them. Everything stays on your disk.

At a glance

📂 Import / export .excalidraw	Real Excalidraw JSON on disk. Round-trips with excalidraw.com. Export PNG, SVG or .excalidraw.
✂️ Region screenshots	Drag a box around part of a diagram, save it or copy it. Vector-rendered at 2560px+.
🌐 Live collaboration	One link, no accounts. The relay runs inside your app, not on someone's server.
🔍 Search by meaning	Ask for "login and sessions" and find the diagram, even if it's called "Untitled 4".
⭐ Folders, stars, archive	Drag to organise, star what matters, archive instead of deleting.
🕓 Version history	Automatic snapshots with one-click revert. Auto-saves as you draw.

Everything is stored locally as plain files. Nothing is uploaded anywhere unless you turn on AI search or start a share session.

Features

Import and export real .excalidraw files

Nothing is locked in. Drawings are stored as ordinary .excalidraw JSON, so anything you make here opens on excalidraw.com and vice versa. Paste a scene straight from your clipboard, pick a file from disk, or export the current drawing as PNG, SVG or .excalidraw.

Importing over an existing drawing snapshots the old version first, so a bad paste is always one click from being undone.

Screenshot a region, not the whole canvas

Hit Screenshot, drag a box around the part of the diagram you actually want, and save it or drop it straight on the clipboard. Output is rendered through Excalidraw's vector exporter and upscaled to at least 2560px on the long edge, so it stays crisp when it lands in a doc or a PR.

Live collaboration from your own machine

Share starts a WebSocket relay inside the app and opens a cloudflared quick tunnel in front of it. You get a link; whoever opens it lands in a browser-based Excalidraw session editing the same drawing, cursors and all. No account, no sign-up, and no server of ours in the middle — the relay is a thread in your app, and it dies when you stop sharing.

Without cloudflared installed you still get a link that works on your local network.

Search by what you drew

Filename search is useless when everything is called "Untitled 4". Point BetterDraw at a Gemini API key and it indexes each drawing in the background — rendering it, reading the text in it, and writing a one-line summary plus tags. Then ask for what you remember ("login and sessions") and get ranked results with a reason for each match.

Indexing runs on idle and when the window loses focus, never while you're searching. Plain substring search over names, summaries and tags works with no key at all.

Folders, stars and archive

Drag drawings between folders, star the ones you keep coming back to, and archive the rest instead of deleting them. Archived drawings stay searchable.

And the rest

• Auto-save — edits are written to disk 2.5s after you stop drawing. There is no save button.
• Version history — snapshots on save (at most one a minute), plus forced ones before an import or a restore, and manual ones on demand. The last 50 are kept per drawing; identical consecutive versions are skipped.
• Native chrome — real macOS vibrancy, transparent titlebar, no Electron.

Install

Download the latest DMG →

Apple Silicon (M1 and later) only. Open the DMG, drag BetterDraw to Applications, and launch it — the build is signed and notarized by Apple, so there are no Gatekeeper warnings to work around.

Build from source

Prerequisites: macOS, Node 20.19+ (or 22.12+), and a Rust toolchain.

git clone https://github.com/sidpremkumar/BetterDraw.git
cd BetterDraw
npm install
./build.sh

build.sh builds the release bundle and copies BetterDraw.app into /Applications. To build without installing:

npm run tauri build

The .app lands in src-tauri/target/release/bundle/macos/.

Known issue: the DMG bundling step can fail with a bundle_dmg.sh error even when the .app itself built fine. The app in bundle/macos/ is usable.

Builds are unsigned by default. To sign with your own Apple Developer identity, set APPLE_SIGNING_IDENTITY before building rather than committing it to tauri.conf.json.

Development

npm install
npm run tauri dev

Demo mode (no Rust needed)

The whole UI runs in a browser against a fake backend and a fixed set of fake drawings — useful for working on the React side, and for anyone who doesn't want to install Rust:

npm run demo

That serves the app at http://localhost:1421 with src/demo standing in for every Tauri command, the collaboration relay, and the Gemini API. It's gated behind VITE_DEMO, so it is compiled out of production builds entirely.

Regenerating the screenshots

The images in this README are generated, not hand-captured:

npm run screenshots            # all of them
npm run screenshots ai-search  # just one

This drives demo mode with Playwright using the Chrome already on your machine and writes to docs/screenshots/. Add a new one by adding an entry to SHOTS in scripts/screenshots.mjs.

Tests

cd src-tauri && cargo test

Setup for the optional bits

AI search — open Settings (the gear in the toolbar), paste a Gemini API key. It is stored in the macOS Keychain, not in a config file. The Settings panel tracks token usage and estimated cost, and lets you reindex everything from scratch.

Public share links — install cloudflared:

brew install cloudflared

Without it, sharing falls back to a local-network-only link.

Where your data lives

What	Where
Drawings	~/Library/Application Support/com.sidpremkumar.betterdraw/drawings/ as .excalidraw files
Metadata (names, folders, stars, AI index)	index.json alongside them
Version snapshots	per-drawing, in the same directory
Gemini API key	macOS Keychain

Nothing is uploaded anywhere. The only outbound requests are to Gemini, when you have configured a key, and to Cloudflare, while you are actively sharing.

How it fits together

src/                       React frontend
  components/              Sidebar, Canvas, Toolbar, dialogs, overlays
  hooks/                   useDrawings, useAutoSave, useCollab, useSearchIndex
  services/                Tauri command wrappers, Gemini client
  collab/                  Sync engine + wire protocol (shared with the guest)
  guest/                   Browser client people get via a share link
  demo/                    Fake backend for demo mode and screenshots
src-tauri/                 Rust backend
  commands/                Drawing, folder, version, export, settings, collab commands
  collab/                  axum WebSocket relay + cloudflared tunnel supervisor
  storage.rs               On-disk layout
scripts/screenshots.mjs    README screenshot generation

A few decisions worth knowing about before you change things:

• The <Canvas> is keyed on activeDrawingId + a data nonce, so switching or restoring a drawing remounts Excalidraw rather than trying to reconcile state.
• src/collab/CollabClient.ts is shared verbatim by the host app and the guest web client. Change the protocol in one place and both sides move together.
• The sidebar deliberately avoids per-row transitions and transforms. Under the sidebar's backdrop-filter, they promote every row to its own compositing layer and visibly lag the app.
• src/App.css defines the z-index scale. Excalidraw portals overlays up to z-index 999999, so all app chrome sits above that, and the window-drag strip sits below anything clickable.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome. npm run demo is the fastest way to try a frontend change; cargo test in src-tauri covers the relay.

Credits

Built on Excalidraw and Tauri. BetterDraw is not affiliated with either project.

License

MIT