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.

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

Setup Excalidraw with the PWA

You can just use the button Install at the top.

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

Quickly start new diagrams

You are in a rush to explain a tricky concept ? Instead of opening the app, saving your previous schema and opening a new one, you can quickly generate an empty diagram and open it with our tool scr. You can install it with lxup get scr. Help: I don't have lxup !

scr draw

The diagram will be generated and opened with xdg-open $final. If you defined the PWA to be the default opener, it should open.

Now, you may also want to bind this command to a global shortcut :)