Whiteboards
Whiteboards give you a freeform canvas for diagrams, sketches, and visual notes, powered by an embedded, fully offline Excalidraw. A whiteboard is just a .excalidraw file that autosaves as you draw, so you can keep it in a project alongside your code and open it any time. Everything runs locally — no account or internet connection is needed.
Create a whiteboard
- Click the pencil-and-scribble button in the toolbar (next to VibeCast and Todos).
- The new whiteboard opens on the canvas immediately.
A new Untitled Whiteboard.excalidraw is created as a draft in your Shelf. Creating more gives Untitled Whiteboard 2, Untitled Whiteboard 3, and so on.
Draw and autosave
Use the Excalidraw tools to add shapes, arrows, text, and freehand drawing. There is no Save button — edits write to the file automatically a moment after you stop drawing.
The canvas follows the app’s light/dark theme automatically.
Move a whiteboard into a project
A new whiteboard lives in the Shelf (a staging area) until you give it a permanent home:
- Open the Files sidebar so you can see the Shelf and your project’s file tree.
- Drag the whiteboard’s Shelf row onto a folder in a project’s file tree.
- The file moves into that folder, the open tab follows it, and it leaves the Shelf.
The drop target must be a folder inside an open project — drops outside a project are ignored.
⚠️ Note: If the target folder already contains a file with the same name, the whiteboard moves in under a numbered name so nothing is overwritten.
Open an existing whiteboard
Open any .excalidraw file from the file explorer or the Shelf, and it renders on the canvas, ready to edit.
Keyboard shortcuts
Drawing shortcuts are Excalidraw’s own and are shown in the canvas tools:
| Action | Shortcut |
|---|---|
| Select | V |
| Rectangle | R |
| Ellipse | O |
| Arrow | A |
| Text | T |
| Undo / Redo | Cmd+Z / Shift+Cmd+Z |
Troubleshooting
| Issue | Solution |
|---|---|
| Dragging the Shelf row doesn’t move it | Drop it onto a folder inside an open project — drops elsewhere are ignored. Make sure the Files sidebar shows the project’s tree. |
| ”The whiteboard runtime is unavailable” | The app build is missing its bundled assets. Reinstall or rebuild the app. |
| A brief flicker when moving into a project | The canvas reloads at its new location — your drawing is preserved. |
Known limitations
- No realtime collaboration — whiteboards are local, single-user, offline files by design.
- No command-line interface for whiteboards yet.
- Opening the same whiteboard in two panes at once reloads each independently rather than sharing one live canvas.