excalidraw CLI

Hi there, I was wondering, what if we have a CLI for excalidraw?

excalidraw my-drawing.excalidraw

This will open a browser. If my-drawing.excalidraw already exists, it will load it.

When user clicks “save” button, it won’t show the dialog but quietly save to my-drawing.excalidraw.

excalidraw my-drawing.excalidraw --export

with --export given, whenever user saves, the PNG version is exported as well.

excalidraw my-drawing.excalidraw --export images/my-drawing.png

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I guess this can unblock new workflows, for example, for developers who want to have drawings in their git repository.

What do you think?

[tommywalkie]

Hello there, I’m currently trying to implement it in the following repo : tommywalkie/excalidraw-cli. A lot of CLI key features / refactoring / testing are still work-in-progress but it already works for directories with *.excalidraw files.

Early concept demo

I may consider opening another issue to export some useful Excalidraw renderer methods and constants (especially drawElementOnCanvas()) so it can be easily integrated with this tool.

[lipis]

I didn’t follow the whole conversation… but should we maybe create an official excalidraw/excalidraw-cli repo and take it from there? It seems that we need this tool.