Excalidraw

Raised as a usability problem by 16 people on Hacker News over 7 years (2020–2026), in 8 threads.

People raised many different problems with Excalidraw, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 16 complaints

Editing existing diagrams is so hard that starting over is easier2026-03-30
Arrows reposition or resize themselves when rescaling, and arrows stick to other elements2026-03-30
Diagrams cut off on right with no way to scroll horizontally2025-11-15
Gets laggy when the chart gets too big2025-05-24
Repeated elements are awkward to reuse because everything sits on one shared canvas2025-02-17
Too fiddly to draw live with an audience2023-01-11
Drawing lags badly once the screen has many elements2021-11-07
Web tool ignores basic web design rules, hurting usability for users2021-11-06
Handwriting strokes lag more the longer the stroke is on iPad Safari2021-11-05
Text isn't attached to shapes, so it's unusable for them2021-11-05
Text and shapes are not linked, so moving one doesn't move the other2021-11-05
Double-clicking a shape adds a label not grouped with it, unexpectedly2021-05-04
Selections made by one person don't show on the other person's screen, making discussion hard2021-05-04
Brush resets to pointer after each stroke, forcing reselection2020-06-15
Top-left open/save/color/stroke palette blocks a corner of the canvas2020-06-15
Tool resets to pointer after each stroke, forcing repeated key presses to keep drawing2020-06-15