Plota documentation

A diagram editor that runs entirely in your browser. No account, no server round-trip, no telemetry — and no network call at all unless you ask for one.

Open the editor Start the guide

In a hurry#

First five minutesOpen it, draw something, save it. Every shortcutThe full table, generated from the bindings. Ollama won't connectIt is CORS. One environment variable. Paste Mermaid13 diagram types, drawn and editable. Use it from ClaudeConnect the hosted MCP server.

The guide#

01 Getting startedRun it, the first five minutes, the shape of the window. 02 Canvas and selectionTools, selecting, moving, resizing, rotating, snapping, the context menu. 03 Shapes and stencils68 shape kinds, BPMN / UML / ERD / network libraries, icons, images, tables. 04 Connectors and Smart RoutePorts, routing modes, waypoints, segment dragging, crossovers, arrow heads. 05 Text and stylingInline editing, rich text, auto-fit, themes, named styles, the format painter. 06 Layers and pagesLayers, groups and containers, multi-page documents. 07 Data and conditional formattingTyped shape data, badges, rules, CSV in and out. 08 Import and exportSVG, PNG, PDF, draw.io, Mermaid, JSON, the watermark — and reading other tools’ files. 09 The AI copilotExplain and improve a layout, what works with no model, providers, the Ollama CORS fix. 10 Keyboard shortcutsThe full table, and where each key is bound. 11 Troubleshooting and FAQSymptoms, causes, fixes, and common questions. 12 Known limitationsWhat this thing genuinely does not do. 13 Mermaid diagramsThe 13 supported types, what is refused, overview + detail pages, icons, notes. 14 The plota command lineRender, split and check diagrams from a terminal or CI; exit codes. 15 Plota in Claude and AI agentsConnect Claude to the hosted MCP server: tools, the viewer, agent skills. 16 Notes and badgesDetailed notes on shapes, connectors and pages: kinds, badges and the notes panel.

Walkthroughs#

An ERD in five minutes Build an entity–relationship diagram from nothing, end to end. Migrating from draw.io Bring a draw.io file across and keep the geometry.

How this page stays true#

Every page here is rendered from docs/user-guide/ in the repository at build time. There is no second copy to drift: the file a contributor edits in a pull request is the file this site publishes. The keyboard-shortcut table is checked against the app's real key bindings by the test suite, so the documentation and the program cannot disagree about what a key does.