Whiteboard

Whiteboard

A calm macOS home for your Excalidraw boards.
Brainstorm freely, then plan what to do next. Local-first, no accounts.

Features

• The real Excalidraw editor. It uses the official @excalidraw/excalidraw package, unmodified, with the same tools, shortcuts, libraries and file format.
• Your boards, organized. Workspaces and folders (ordinary Finder folders), tabs, favorites, recents, archive, trash, thumbnails, and ⌘K search that also looks inside boards.
• Never lose work. Atomic autosave, local version history, and conflict detection when a file changes outside the app.
• Visual references. Paste a YouTube, Instagram or web link to get a preview card. Press ⇧⌘2 to drop a screenshot straight onto the board.
• Action. A separate, deliberately small planning view: today's 3 priorities, the week's outcomes, next moves, milestones, blockers, a calendar of everything with a date, a daily check-in, and a Journal. Selections on a board can be sent to Action, with a link back.
• Local and private. Works offline. No accounts, cloud, analytics or AI by default.

Action — Plan	Action — Calendar

Brainstorm and Action

Whiteboard has two separate sides, switched with the Brainstorm | Action control at the top-left (⇧⌘A):

• Brainstorm is the Excalidraw workspace, unchanged. There's no task UI on the canvas.
• Action is a plain execution view:
  • Today: up to 3 priorities. Unfinished ones from earlier days wait under "Unfinished from earlier" until you move them to today.
  • This Week: up to 3 outcomes.
  • Next Moves: goal → one next action. When you finish a move, Whiteboard asks for the goal's next one, or you can mark the goal done.
  • Milestones: a date with a countdown ("First draft — 9 days").
  • Blockers.
  • Daily check-in: three optional questions. After 6 PM (configurable) it's a quiet nudge in Action, never a popup.
  • Calendar: a month view of priorities planned for each day, milestones, tasks with due dates, blockers, what you finished, and journal entries. Click a day to see it in full or plan it.
  • Journal: check-ins and finished items in date order, grouped by week with a one-line summary.

Brainstorm → Action: select shapes, text or groups, then right-click → Send to Action… (added to Excalidraw's own menu), ⌥⌘A, or ⌘K → Make Priority / Next Move / Milestone / Blocker. The item keeps a link to the board and the exact shapes.

Action → Brainstorm: click an item's board chip to open the board with those shapes selected and centered. Any item can be linked to a board from its ⋯ menu; the picker suggests related boards.

Suggestions (never applied without a click):

• On Home, under "Tidy up": cleaner names for messy boards (Untitled Whiteboard 7 → Onboarding Flow) and folder moves for loose boards.
• In Action, under "From your boards": to-dos found in your boards (TODO:, Next:, [ ], ☐).
• Related boards in the board picker, and weekly summaries in the Journal.

These are simple local rules over your boards' text. In Settings → Action you can optionally use a model running on this Mac via Ollama (127.0.0.1:11434) for board names and weekly summaries. It's off by default, and nothing leaves your computer.

Action data lives in …/com.local.whiteboard/action.json (plus .bak) and is never written into .excalidraw files.

Visual references and screenshots

• Paste a link onto the canvas (⌘V), drop one from a browser, or use ⌘K → Insert Web Reference / /embed <url>. YouTube, Instagram and other websites become a compact card made of ordinary Excalidraw elements (rounded rectangle, thumbnail image, text), grouped together. Cards save in the .excalidraw file and appear in PNG/SVG exports. Each element stores customData.wbRef = { cardId, url, kind, role } (Excalidraw's official metadata field), and the card's rectangle has a standard Excalidraw link, so the link still works in plain Excalidraw.
• Links in your own text are clickable. Any text or shape label that contains a URL (https://… or www.…) gets a standard Excalidraw link automatically. ⌘-click any linked shape or text to open it.
• Open a card by double-clicking it or clicking Excalidraw's link icon. Clicking or dragging never opens it. Right-click a card for Open Link, Copy URL, Refresh Preview, Duplicate, Remove Preview, Convert to Plain Link and Delete.
• Screenshots: ⇧⌘2 (works system-wide; you can turn that off in Settings → Capture), ⌘K → Capture Screenshot / Window / Full Screen, or /shot. This uses macOS's own selection UI: drag a region, press Space for window mode, or Esc to cancel. The image is inserted into the active board as a normal Excalidraw image and stored inside the board file. The temp file is deleted at once, and nothing is saved to the Desktop. macOS requires the Screen Recording permission for this. Whiteboard asks once and then links to System Settings. Unsigned local builds may need the permission granted again after a rebuild.
• Clipboard images: ⌘V works as in Excalidraw (also when the pointer isn't over the canvas). ⌘K → Insert Image from Clipboard (or /paste) reads the macOS clipboard directly.

Remote requests (privacy)

Whiteboard makes network requests only when you insert or refresh a link:

Link	Requests
YouTube	youtube.com/oembed (YouTube's documented public endpoint: title and channel) and the video thumbnail from i.ytimg.com
Instagram	one GET of the post page. Instagram serves no preview tags to plain requests, so the page is then loaded once in a hidden, invisible web view to read its image and caption (no login, no tokens). If that fails you get a clean fallback card.
Any other site	one GET of the page (title / Open Graph tags), its preview image, and its favicon

If a site can't be resolved, a DNS lookup of apple.com (no HTTP request) distinguishes "offline" from "site unreachable". Board contents are never sent anywhere, and there are no analytics. Previews are cached in …/com.local.whiteboard/link-cache/, and the thumbnail is embedded in the board, so existing cards look the same offline. A link pasted while offline becomes a basic card ("Preview unavailable offline") with no retries.

Architecture

Tauri 2 (Rust)                         Web frontend (React 19 + TypeScript + Vite)
├─ files.rs     atomic writes,         ├─ editor/      one <Excalidraw/> per open tab + BoardSession
│               folder tree, moves,    │               (autosave, conflicts, history, thumbnails)
│               conflict detection     ├─ shell/       sidebar, tabs, status bar, palette, dialogs
├─ appdata.rs   history, thumbnails,   ├─ lib/         board operations, commands/shortcuts,
│               trash, app paths       │               templates, exports, library, lifecycle
├─ search.rs    text index over boards ├─ state/       zustand store + state.json persistence
├─ webref.rs    link previews + cache  ├─ platform/    IPC wrappers + native file pickers
│                                      └─ action/      Action view, calendar, suggestions, Journal
├─ capture.rs   screenshots, clipboard image, ⇧⌘2
└─ menu.rs      native macOS menu bar

• Rust owns every disk write. Board writes are atomic (temp file → fsync → rename), refuse non-Excalidraw content, and refuse to overwrite a file whose modification time changed since Whiteboard last read it (CONFLICT).
• Each open tab keeps its own live Excalidraw instance, so switching is instant and undo history is per board. Inactive editors are hidden and inert. Restored tabs mount lazily on first activation.
• The shell's React state (zustand) never holds canvas data; Excalidraw's onChange only touches plain fields in BoardSession, so drawing performance is unaffected.

How Excalidraw is integrated

• Uses the official @excalidraw/excalidraw 0.18.1 npm package, unmodified (no fork). The toolbar, menus, shortcuts, libraries, export dialog, themes, fonts and file format are Excalidraw's own.
• Fonts: scripts/copy-excalidraw-assets.mjs copies the package's font files into public/fonts, and window.EXCALIDRAW_ASSET_PATH points at the app bundle, so fonts work fully offline.
• Native file dialogs for Excalidraw's own features: Excalidraw does its file I/O through browser-fs-access, which uses the File System Access API when present. src/platform/nativeFilePickers.ts provides showOpenFilePicker / showSaveFilePicker backed by native macOS dialogs and Rust file commands. Insert image, export PNG/SVG, and library import/export therefore work natively without changing Excalidraw.
• UIOptions disables only Excalidraw's browser-specific file actions (Open, Save to file, Export JSON). The main menu gets native Open… / Save As… / Version History in their place.
• Boards are saved with Excalidraw's serializeAsJSON(..., "local") and loaded with its restore(). Whiteboard writes nothing extra into .excalidraw files.
• Drag and drop: Excalidraw handles image, SVG and library drops itself. Whiteboard only intercepts dropped .excalidraw files so they open as tabs instead of replacing the current board. The web view can't see a dropped file's path, so a small Rust locator (locate_file: name, size and mtime, then Spotlight) finds the original. If it can't, a copy is imported.
• Shortcut conflict: Excalidraw uses ⌘K for "add link". Whiteboard uses ⌘K for search, so "Add Link to Selection" is available from the ⌘K palette (and from Excalidraw's element toolbar).

Where data lives

What	Location
Boards and workspaces	~/Documents/Whiteboard/ (ordinary folders and .excalidraw files; changeable in Settings)
App metadata and session (favorites, recents, archive list, tabs, viewports, prefs)	~/Library/Application Support/com.local.whiteboard/state.json (+ .bak)
Version history	…/com.local.whiteboard/history/<path-hash>/<epoch-ms>.excalidraw
Thumbnails	…/com.local.whiteboard/thumbs/<path-hash>.png
Trash	…/com.local.whiteboard/trash/<id>/ (only "Delete Permanently" / "Empty Trash" remove files)
Personal library	…/com.local.whiteboard/library.excalidrawlib
Your templates	…/com.local.whiteboard/templates/*.excalidraw
Link preview cache	…/com.local.whiteboard/link-cache/*.json
Action items, check-ins, dismissed suggestions	…/com.local.whiteboard/action.json
Window size and position	managed by tauri-plugin-window-state

Archive is metadata only: archived boards stay where they are on disk and are hidden from the workspace tree. If you rename or move boards inside Whiteboard, favorites, history and thumbnails follow them. If you rename or move them in Finder, the boards still show up in the tree, but their favorite/archive flags are dropped.

History: a snapshot every 10 minutes while you edit (configurable), on every ⌘S, before the first edit of each session, and before any restore, reload or conflict overwrite. Snapshots are thinned out to one per hour after 2 hours and one per day after a day, kept for 60 days, with at most 80 per board.

Development

Requirements: Node 20+, Rust (stable), Xcode Command Line Tools.

npm install
npm run app:dev        # run the desktop app with hot reload
npm run dev            # UI only, in a browser, against an in-memory dev backend
npm run typecheck
cd src-tauri && cargo test

npm run dev in a plain browser automatically uses src/dev/mockBackend.ts (dev builds only), which imitates the Rust commands with an in-memory filesystem stored in localStorage. It's handy for UI work.

Build

npm run app:build

Output:

• src-tauri/target/release/bundle/macos/Whiteboard.app
• src-tauri/target/release/bundle/dmg/Whiteboard_1.0.0_aarch64.dmg

The build is unsigned. To open it the first time: right-click Whiteboard.app → Open. You can also run xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine Whiteboard.app.

.excalidraw files are registered with the "Alternate" rank. To make Whiteboard the default app: Finder → Get Info on any .excalidraw file → Open with: Whiteboard → Change All….

Keyboard shortcuts

Action	Shortcut
New board	⌘N or ⌘T
New board from template	⌥⌘N
New folder	⇧⌘N
Open file	⌘O
Save now (+ history snapshot)	⌘S
Save As	⇧⌘S
Close board / reopen closed board	⌘W / ⇧⌘T
Search boards & commands	⌘K
Switch tabs	⌘1 … ⌘9, ⌃⇥ / ⌃⇧⇥
Toggle sidebar	⌘\
Focus mode	⇧⌘F (Esc exits)
Version history	⌘Y
Quick Look selected board (sidebar/cards)	Space
Settings	⌘,
Shortcut list	⌘/
Export image options (Excalidraw)	⇧⌘E
Capture screenshot onto the board	⇧⌘2 (system-wide)
Switch Brainstorm / Action	⇧⌘A
Send selection to Action	⌥⌘A
Slash commands on the canvas	/ then shot, embed <url>, window, screen, paste
Open a link card	double-click

All other Excalidraw shortcuts work as usual. Press ? on the canvas for Excalidraw's full list.

Licensing

Whiteboard is released under the MIT License. It is an independent project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Excalidraw.

Excalidraw is MIT-licensed (© 2020 Excalidraw). The bundled fonts are under the SIL Open Font License 1.1, except Comic Shanns, which is MIT. Full texts and attributions are in LICENSES/ and inside the app under Settings → About → Licenses. The Whiteboard icon is original artwork and does not use the Excalidraw logo.