THthunderbong·Jul 14, 2022Submission
Drawio: Source to App.diagrams.net
2 points · Open discussionjgraph
drawio
JavaScript2012–2025
jgraph / drawio
drawio
draw.io is a JavaScript, client-side editor for general diagramming.
31Distinct people
43Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
9.3KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
draw.io is a JavaScript, client-side editor for general diagramming.
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
- jgraph/drawio-desktop · linked in 3 of the same discussions
- 8dcc/8dcc.github.io · linked in 2 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 2:59:58 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year43 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2012-12-20 15:13:40 UTC to 2025-10-18 18:04:25 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2012 | 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2013 | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 0 | 4 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 8 | 1 | 7 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 1 | 2 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 6 | 2 | 4 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 1 | 4 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 0 | 4 |
What Hacker News says
3 sourcesdraw.io, aka https://www.diagrams.net
- Like OmniGraffle, but free, works great and open source!
- You can use it online, saving to your cloud drive
- Or you can install the desktop version
GitHub: https://github.com/jgraph/drawio
In Ask HN: What are some good non-subscription Mac apps?Foreign Object support in SVG is an optional part of the 1.1 SVG. Yes, it's true that only browsers support it in practice.
The reason for its usage is historic. Originally, this project was the underlying diagramming library only, that uses the SVG DOM for rendering. There was no application and no SVG export, that wasn't a function of the library.
FOs in SVG gave us the whole range of HTML in shape labels. So, as well as complex text formatting, we used it for tables, complex composites, etc. There a large legacy of shapes that use complex HTML for labels, we can't drop support for those.
The app itself came later and the SVG export function even later. It was fairly easy to generate because we can take it from the SVG DOM. But, converting HTML to SVG requires parsing the full HTML specification and generating the SVG to maintain compat
Read the rest
ibilty. This is an horrifically large task, it would require probably 5+ people full time, we don't have that resource.
I'm not sure calling it SVG is "tacky". It is part of the SVG 1.1 spec, albeit an optional one, it's not like it's isn't SVG at all. But yes, it causes confusion, thus the entry in the README [1], "It is not an SVG editing app, the SVG export is designed only for embedding in web pages, not for further editing in other tools."
Even using SVG for word wrapping alone, we've repeatedly asked critics how to do that without HTML for measuring the font metrics, we're yet to receive an answer how to do that in JavaScript. We've had plenty of comments pointing out this is wrong, we need a practical alternative thought out in detail.
[1] https://github.com/jgraph/drawio