Meet Drawy, KDE’s first infinite whiteboard app

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iJeff@reddit

I'm surprised it isn't named Kanvas or Koncept.

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NakedHoodie@reddit

Sounds like a Pokemon... and Nintendo's about to C&D your comment.

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Lorric71@reddit

I was going to argue that Crayon is a trademark. But it isn't. Crayola makes crayons, which a just a word for a pigmented wax used for writing or drawing (thank you wikipedia).

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RanidSpace@reddit

iirc it was a solo project picked up by kde. i remember seeing a reddit post about it before it was

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digitalsignalperson@reddit

Cool. Curious to try vs Rnote (which still has some annoying bugs years later).

> Please be aware that Drawy does NOT currently offer official packages in any public repository. However, official nightly packages are available on KDE Invent

How long until in repos?

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CarlSchwanKDE@reddit (OP)

The app was released yesterday, I expect Arch, fedora and opensuse to be quick to pick it up

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ucsilahsor@reddit

Why not distribute it directly via flathub?

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hjake123@reddit

Once they're confident with the release I'm sure they will

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prone-to-drift@reddit

And it's already on Arch lol.

drawy and drawy-git on the AUR.

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MmmCurry@reddit

Nixpkgs added the alpha build in November, but it's missing quite a few important features like exporting to image. Update coming soon I imagine.

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Law_hacker_1000@reddit

this is actually pretty cool.

it would be very cool to be able to connect and draw mind maps and render into outlines

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RainOrigami@reddit

Tried it, doesn't even support pen pressure??

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haxguru@reddit

Hi, Drawy maintainer here. It does support pen pressure. You can file a bug report here with relevant screenshots: https://bugs.kde.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=drawy.

Do note that the drawy on the AUR is outdated. You should use drawy-git, the nightly flatpak or wait for the official repo on flathub :)

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Ok-Winner-6589@reddit

Yo they no longer name their apps starting with K, they aren't even using the letter K, dissapointing

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troyunrau@reddit

Context: I was part of the KDE Marketing Working Group circa 2005-2011.

This was a conscious decision that we made years ago. Part of the issue with naming everything with the K was that people were making systems that were Gnome only or KDE only, and then trying to "strip out the bloat". At the time, we were trying to position the KDE libraries as portable extension to Qt that could be used in nay context, not just withing the Linux desktop environment called KDE. So part of the reason the desktop environment got named Plasma was to separate the name of the DE from the name of the development community producing it. And likewise, a lot of apps were encouraged to pick non K names. A good example is Filelight, which is a nice file system usage via tool which is even available on the Microsoft Store (even though it originated in KDE). Or how Dolphin became the file manager, trying to encourage it's use for users of other DEs even if they weren't in Plasma.

I can't say we were wildly successful with this goals. But a lot of the apps that start with K predate this effort. Likely the name Drawy is chosen so that users don't assume they need to be in KDE userland to use it.

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__konrad@reddit

At the time, we were trying to position the KDE libraries

And most of the libraries start with K: https://api.kde.org/index.html ;)

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troyunrau@reddit

Yes. That's less annoying though. Makes for relatively clean namespace when programming. ;)

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Ok-Winner-6589@reddit

It was a joke, but thanks for answering and the info. Didn't knew It was an issue for some that some apps were tied to teams developing a DE

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LiftingRecipient420@reddit

Also, as a user, everything starting with a K is awful UX.

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troyunrau@reddit

It's funny you mention this. In the KDE 1.x days, I was notionally involved in a ground called KDE-HIG -- human interface guidelines. Back in the 90s, Apple had such a reference document for development, which if you followed it, your app would look and feel native and well integrated. KDE was young (and I was young) and a bunch of us did cargo cult type things to try to replicate what we saw leading to the success of other platforms. At the time, we recommended against names that started with k, but it was entirely too entrenched already. And admittedly, naming systems like this were the style at the time (xterm, xeyes, xmms, etc.) and putting the k in was for differentiation. Well, the HIG fizzled and died and it wasn't until years later that the k got dropped.

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LiftingRecipient420@reddit

Interesting anecdote.

And yeah I'm glad the k is gone. As petty as it sounds, that k was actually a big reason why I wouldn't use KDE.

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AncomBunker47@reddit

It seems quite similar to Milton from the screenshot at least

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Kind_Style7978@reddit

yes, an open source milton or mischief replacement that runs on linux is great. Theoretically Lorien could do it but Lorien was buggy on Windows for my use cases and I was not yet ready to give up on onenote...these days, while I still love onenote 2010 and use it with syncthing, I'm moving in a nasty pile of markdown files direction because, while I prefer to have all my text + file embeds + images + search index + ink all together in a onenote 3 ring binder, I can recreate that somewhat with using actual files on the actual file system and let local LLMs see the goodies.

This new tool will come with KDE which is my preferred debian edition, so now I can have drawy handle the infinite canvas docs while markdown files and image files and audio files and binary files live in an actual folder on disk. Not as searchable as onenote, but I leave the proprietary world behind and can probably write some macros to keybind the onenote search to everything search and such.

I will compliment the student and blog post writer for sticking with an annoying coding problem and producing a FOSS application that the rest of us get to benefit from!

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