Excalidraw canvas and tools

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Excalidraw's toolbar is short on purpose. Everything you need is a single keystroke away, and the tools themselves are deliberately imprecise, which is the point.

Set up the canvas first: grid on or off, and a background that suits where the diagram will be read.

#What this is for

  • Starting a sketch or workshop diagram.

  • Getting the canvas to snap, or to stop snapping.

  • Setting a background for a diagram that will be exported.

#How it works

The Excalidraw toolbar showing lock, hand, selection, rectangle, diamond, ellipse, arrow, line, draw, text and eraser tools, each with a number beside it.
Every tool carries the number that selects it from the keyboard, from selection through to the eraser.

Action

How

Select tool

V or 1. Escape also returns you to it.

Rectangle, diamond, ellipse

R, D and O, or 2, 3 and 4.

Arrow and line

A and L, or 5 and 6.

Freedraw

P or 7, for genuinely hand-drawn marks.

Pan

Hold space and drag, or use the hand tool.

Zoom to fit

Shift+1.

Grid

Ctrl+' toggles it. Snapping follows the grid when it is on.

#A few things that catch people out

  • Escape always returns to the select tool, which is the fastest way out of any state.

  • Shift+1 fits everything, and is the equivalent of draw.io's Ctrl+Shift+H.

  • The canvas background is part of the scene and appears in exports.

Rough on purpose.