Local use

The fact that Excalidraw is used on your browser makes file saving very annoying. If your Downloads folder is filled with Untitled-2026-03-07-1445.excalidraw, Untitled-2026-03-07-1445(1).excalidraw, Untitled-2026-03-07-1445(2).excalidraw... and you don't know which schema to open or delete, there is a better way !

Excalidraw is a web app and can be "installed" via the PWA concept. This doesn't work with Firefox. We only tested this with Chromium based browsers. This also make it possible to open your diagrams directly from your file explorer.

open-draw-via-filesystem.png

And when you save the file, it will directly save it without using the Downloads folder !

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Setup Excalidraw with the PWA

You can just use the button Install at the top.

chromium-pwa-installation.png

If necessary, you can define the app Excalidraw to be the default opener for .excalidraw files, if it doesn't setup this configuration automatically.