Infinite canvas
The canvas never fills up. Draw wherever thought goes, and zoom to 10% to take in the whole picture at once.
All of it happens on one canvas.
Runs on your machine only. Your content lives on your own computer — no cloud storage, no network calls.
No sign-up, no template picker — one click and you're on the canvas.
Basic shapes
Sketches, formal flowcharts, UI mockups, and mind maps share one toolset and one sheet of paper. Draw at whatever fidelity the idea is at — no need to decide what kind of file this is first.
The canvas never fills up. Draw wherever thought goes, and zoom to 10% to take in the whole picture at once.
Pick a shape and start connecting — the connectors find their own way. If the layout gets messy, one click re-arranges it; no hand-aligning every line.
Nav bars, forms, cards, and dialogs are ready-made components. Drag them out and you have a screen you can walk people through.
Twelve layouts, eight color themes. Drag one node and the whole tree re-arranges itself. Collapse, notes, boundaries, and relation lines are all there.
Rows, columns, and lanes keep themselves aligned — adding a row never bends the rest of the diagram.
A sketchy look invites feedback. When it's time to deliver, one switch turns it into clean lines.
Import & convert
Mermaid from your docs, PlantUML from your repos, draw.io and Visio archives, mind maps exported from other tools — drop them in and they become canvas elements.
graph LR A[Order] --> B{In stock?} B -->|Yes| C[Ship] B -->|No| D[Restock]
What's on the right areelements, not an image— drag a node away, reword a label, swap the colors, and keep drawing.
Becomes editable elements
Nodes, connectors, and colors all come through as canvas elements you can keep editing. The PlantUML engine runs in your browser — source never leaves your machine.
Originals, spread open
No format conversion, no lost originals — drop a file in and page through it right on the canvas.
Becomes highlighted code blocks
Highlighting follows the language, and web code can render live right there.
Even the formats we can't convert get an answer: legacy binary .vsd prompts you to save as .vsdx in Visio first; Axure .rp is recognized, with an “export SVG, then import” path laid out.
Documents & code
Drag in a PDF, a contract, a report, or a piece of code. They're not attachments waiting to be downloaded — they're content you page through and read right on the canvas.
Syntax highlighting follows the language. Write web code and see it rendered on the canvas immediately.
Page through one at a time, or spread all pages out side by side. The original file stays inside the element and travels with the canvas.
Image editing
A pasted screenshot usually needs one more cut. Trim the excess, mask the sensitive bits, stitch several into one — all on the canvas, without bouncing to an image editor.
Performance at scale
Canvases get heavy with use — that's the honest problem with every whiteboard. We manage it like a test that can fail: every change runs a 10,000-element drag-and-zoom benchmark in a real browser, and a regression blocks the release.
| Scenario | Measured | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Dragging 10,000 on-screen elements | 9.5 ms | Frame time, p95. The 60fps budget is 16.7 ms — half of it still to spare. |
| Dropped frames while dragging | 0.23 % | Share of frames over the 60fps budget — about two in a thousand. |
| Zooming out to 10% | 5 ms | From wheel input to screen response, p95. |
| Twenty 4K images | ↓ 70 % | What tiered previews save versus full-size decoding, with the cache capped at 192 MiB. |
Measured on Chromium 150 and an Apple M1 Max, on the real Canvas2D render path, with all 10,000 elements in view; frame intervals come from
performance.now()
wall-clock time. The benchmark script and its history ship with the codebase.
Side by side
轻想X is built on top of Excalidraw — no hiding that. Below we only list where we've genuinely moved ahead; where they can do it too, we say so.
| Dimension | 轻想X | Excalidraw | draw.io |
|---|---|---|---|
| First minute | Opens straight onto the canvas. No sign-up, no storage picker, no template picker | Also opens straight to drawing | Pick a storage location, a file name, and a template — three dialogs before you see a canvas |
| Where your data goes | Runs on your machine; content stays on your own computer | Local-first as well | Local or cloud storage — you must pick correctly the first time |
| Mind map | Native. Twelve layouts, drag one node to re-arrange the tree, XMind imports down to the color theme | No native mind maps — you draw the boxes by hand | Tree layout, node positions maintained by hand |
| Document originals | PDF, Word, PPT, and Excel open and page right on the canvas | Pasted as images only; the original lives elsewhere | Images or links only; the original lives elsewhere |
| Code block | Syntax highlighting for 30+ languages, web code renders live | Plain text boxes | Plain text boxes |
| Image editing | Crop, slice, mosaic, collage | Crop only | Essentially none |
| File interchange | Reads draw.io, Visio, XMind, Mermaid, PlantUML | Mermaid converts; draw.io and mind-map files don't open | Reads Visio; mind-map formats don't open |
| Performance policy | The 10,000-element benchmark is public; a regression blocks the release | No public benchmark | No public benchmark |
No sign-up, no template — past this step it's just the canvas.