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Nexthena — A Local-First Whiteboard App Built on Excalidraw

#excalidraw #ai #openai #tauri2

Managing 50+ whiteboard files locally shouldn't be this hard. So I built something.

First, a Big Thank You

Before anything else — a huge shoutout to the Excalidraw team. What they've built is genuinely one of the most elegant and expressive diagramming tools out there. If you've never tried it, you're missing out. I've been a heavy user for years.

And that's exactly how Nexthena was born.

The Problem: 50+ Files and No Good Way to Manage Them

I'm a visual thinker. Over the past few years I've accumulated over 50 Excalidraw files — architecture diagrams, API flows, brainstorm sketches, system designs. They're scattered across folders, named things like draft_v3_final_FINAL.excalidraw, and there's absolutely no way to search, organize, or roll back changes to any of them.

Excalidraw itself is fantastic for creating — but it doesn't try to be a file manager. That gap is completely reasonable for a web tool. But for someone managing dozens of files locally, it's a real friction point.

I wanted:

  • A clean local interface for all my .excalidraw files
  • The ability to create, view, rename, and delete files in one place
  • Version history and rollback when I inevitably break something
  • Eventually: AI-assisted diagram generation to sketch out structure fast

So I built Nexthena.

What Is Nexthena?

Nexthena is a local-first desktop whiteboard application powered by the Excalidraw rendering engine, built with Tauri 2.

It's not trying to replace Excalidraw — it wraps and extends it with the file management and workflow layer that I personally needed. All your data stays on your machine. No account. No cloud sync. No subscription.

Platforms: Windows · macOS · Linux
Pricing: Free on Windows & Linux — one-time $2 on macOS

Core Features

📁 Local File Management

The main thing Nexthena adds over raw Excalidraw usage: a proper file browser. You can:

  • Create new whiteboards from scratch or from templates
  • Open and edit existing .excalidraw files
  • Rename and delete with a clean UI
  • Search across all your local files

No more hunting through Finder or Explorer.

🕰️ History & Rollback

Every time you save, Nexthena keeps a history snapshot. Made a mess of that diagram you spent an hour on? Roll back to any previous version. It's the kind of safety net that changes how freely you're willing to experiment.

🤖 AI Generator

This is the feature I'm most excited to keep developing. Once you configure an LLM provider (any OpenAI-protocol-compatible API — OpenAI, local models via Ollama, etc.), the AI generator can take a text prompt and produce a whiteboard skeleton for you.

Right now it accepts text input and generates Excalidraw elements directly onto your canvas. Image and voice input are on the roadmap.

It's not trying to generate pixel-perfect final diagrams — the goal is to give you a structural scaffold in seconds so you can focus on the thinking, not the drag-and-drop setup.

📦 Excalidraw Library Compatibility

Nexthena is fully compatible with Excalidraw's shape library format. If you've built up a library of custom components or downloaded community libraries, they work here without any conversion.

🎨 Templates

Built-in templates for common diagram types (flowcharts, sequence diagrams) so you're not starting from a blank canvas every time. More templates are coming with each release.

Tech Stack

For those curious about what's under the hood:

  • Frontend: Excalidraw (React) + custom file management UI
  • Desktop shell: Tauri 2 — Rust-based, lightweight, cross-platform
  • AI integration: Any OpenAI-protocol-compatible LLM provider

Tauri was a natural choice here. It produces small binaries, has excellent cross-platform support, and lets the Excalidraw React frontend run as-is inside the webview. The local file system access Tauri provides is exactly what the file management layer needed.

Current Status: v1.16

Nexthena is actively maintained and has iterated through 16 releases. It's stable enough for daily use — I use it myself every day.

That said, it's still early. There are rough edges, missing features, and plenty of ideas on the backlog. Your feedback is genuinely what shapes the roadmap.

Things actively in progress:

  • Image and voice input for the AI generator
  • More built-in templates
  • Improved search and tagging
  • Better onboarding for new users

Try It Out

If you're an Excalidraw power user who's been struggling with local file management, I'd genuinely love for you to give it a try and tell me what's missing or broken.

And if you build something cool with it — I'd love to see it.

Thanks for reading. And once more, thank you to the entire Excalidraw team for making something worth building on top of. 🙏

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