excalidraw

A tool for generating editable Excalidraw diagram files with a hand-drawn whiteboard appearance. Excalidraw is an app for making and editing diagrams, and the output can be opened in its web or desktop app and several editor plugins.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for informal sketches, brainstorming, early designs, and whiteboard-style diagrams saved as local `.excalidraw` files.
Why use it?
It lets a coding agent create a diagram that remains editable instead of producing only a fixed image. The file can be refined later in Excalidraw or a supported editor.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/zate/cc-plugins/excalidraw
Any agent
npx skills add Zate/cc-plugins --skill excalidraw
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Zate/cc-plugins

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 68 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,487 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00068 $0.02487
Opus 5 $0.00034 $0.01243
Sonnet 5 $0.00014 $0.00497
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00249

Measured 2d ago against content hash ca646574e7ea, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

excalidraw scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

plugins/diagrams/skills/excalidraw/SKILL.md · 290 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 290 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Excalidraw Diagram Skill

Generate diagrams by writing .excalidraw files directly. The output is a JSON file in the Excalidraw format that can be opened in the Excalidraw desktop app, web app (excalidraw.com), VS Code extension, or Obsidian plugin.

IMPORTANT: Do NOT use the Excalidraw MCP tools (mcp__claude_ai_Excalidraw__*), even if they are available. We generate the file ourselves for full control over quality and layout. The MCP tools produce lower quality results and require uploading to excalidraw.com.

When to use Excalidraw:

  • User explicitly asks for Excalidraw / whiteboard / sketch / hand-drawn style
  • Diagrams for brainstorming, early design, or informal communication
  • User wants an editable diagram file they can refine in Excalidraw

When another format is better:

  • Formal documentation or whitepapers (SVG)
  • Pixel-precise positioning (SVG)
  • Inline in GitHub markdown (Mermaid)

Consult the design-system skill for color, composition, and quality rules.

Workflow

1. Plan the Layout

Before generating the file:

  • Identify all elements (boxes, arrows, labels) and their relationships
  • Plan the spatial layout on a grid (estimate x, y, width, height for each)
  • Use generous spacing: 40-60px between peer elements, 20-30px padding inside groups

2. Build the Excalidraw JSON

An .excalidraw file is JSON with this top-level structure:

{
  "type": "excalidraw",
  "version": 2,
  "source": "diagrams-plugin",
  "elements": [ ... ],
  "appState": {
    "viewBackgroundColor": "#ffffff",
    "gridSize": null
  },
  "files": {}
}

3. Write the File

Save with .excalidraw extension using the Write tool. The user handles viewing/rendering.

Element Format

Required Fields (all elements)

Every element needs: type, id (unique string), x, y, width, height, version, versionNonce, isDeleted, groupIds, boundElements, seed.

Use this template for default fields:

{
  "version": 1,
  "versionNonce": 1,
  "isDeleted": false,
  "fillStyle": "solid",
  "strokeWidth": 2,
  "strokeStyle": "solid",
  "roughness": 1,
  "opacity": 100,
  "groupIds": [],
  "frameId": null,
  "roundness": null,
  "seed": 1,
  "updated": 1,
  "locked": false,
  "link": null
}

Read the full file on GitHub · 290 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 290 lines · 68 tokens per session scan A ca646574e7ea

Subscribe to this mod's changes

excalidraw is a skill published in the GitHub repository Zate/cc-plugins (10 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 68 tokens to every session and 2,487 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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