Built alongside Fathom
I’m Ashrya, an AI scientist. While building Fathom — a research-paper reader with a per-paper whiteboard tab — it became clear that the whiteboard surface was useful on its own. People wanted it for paste-driven brainstorming against arbitrary content (slide decks, code architectures, screenshots of the whiteboard you just photographed in a meeting), not just papers.
So I extracted the same component into a standalone Mac app and a published npm package. That’s clawdSlate. There’s nothing to sign up for. If you already pay for Claude, you have everything clawdSlate needs.
A canvas, not a chat
clawdSlate doesn’t return text-about-a-diagram. It returns the diagram. On a real Excalidraw canvas. That you can edit.
You paste content into a chat input. Claude reads it. The agent draws — boxes, arrows, labels, evidence callouts — on the canvas while you watch. When it lands, you can move things around, rewrite labels, add your own annotations. Type into the chat to refine: “add the loss equation under the training loop”, “show what happens when the cache misses”. Each refinement sees what’s already on the canvas plus what you originally pasted.
What it feels like
Open clawdSlate. Paste. Hit return. Watch the agent draw. Edit the result. Type a refinement. Repeat. Close the app, reopen tomorrow — the canvas is still there.
What makes it different
- The canvas is live, not a generated image. clawdSlate doesn’t return a PNG. The agent draws on a real Excalidraw canvas — same primitives the open-source editor uses — so anything Claude draws, you can edit.
- Grounded in what you paste. No retrieval, no embeddings, no general-purpose web lookup.
- Paste anything. Markdown, plain text, PDFs, images.
- Available two ways. Standalone Mac app, or
fathom-whiteboardon npm as an embeddable React component.
Install
clawdSlate’s primary install path is the terminal. One line — see the chip at the top of this page, or copy from here:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ashryaagr/clawdslate/main/install.sh | bash
The script extracts clawdSlate to /Applications, clears the
com.apple.quarantine xattr so Gatekeeper doesn’t prompt, ad-hoc
re-signs, and drops a clawdslate launcher at ~/.local/bin/clawdslate so
clawdslate and clawdslate update work from any shell. Then it launches
clawdSlate — you land on the welcome screen in one motion. Full
walkthrough in the install guide.
Prefer a drag-to-Applications install? See the Mac DMG section of the install guide — the DMG download link + the one-time Gatekeeper approval walkthrough live there.
Embed in your own app:
npm install fathom-whiteboard
Your data stays yours
clawdSlate runs entirely on your machine. No telemetry. No analytics. No accounts. No server ever sees your pasted content, your canvas, or your conversations with Claude. The only network calls are your own Claude Code CLI talking to Anthropic on your behalf, and the app’s release-checker pinging GitHub for new versions.
Per-session canvas state lives under ~/Library/Application Support/clawdSlate/sessions/last/. Delete that folder any time to wipe local state without touching anything else.
Free and open source
clawdSlate is MIT-licensed and built in the open.
- Source →
- Releases →
- Methodology → — how the pipeline actually works.
- Design principles → — the rules clawdSlate was built on. Read before proposing changes.
- Report a bug →
clawdSlate and Fathom
Fathom is the research-paper reader. clawdSlate is the standalone version of Fathom’s in-paper whiteboard tab. Use Fathom for reading and zooming into research papers; use clawdSlate for paste-driven brainstorming against arbitrary content. Both ship the same fathom-whiteboard npm package — Fathom embeds it as one of the per-paper tabs, clawdSlate wraps it in a minimal Electron shell.