What it does
EsDraw brings isometric / 2.5D diagramming to the tool millions already use. No new app to learn, no export dance — right-click a shape in draw.io, choose a direction, and it snaps onto an isometric plane. Walls, floors, boxes, containers, connectors and their labels all shear together as one coherent scene.
It ships four isometric shears plus reset — Shear Left, Shear Right, Shear Clockwise, Shear Counterclockwise, and No Shear — using the exact 2:1 isometric angle (26.565°) and transforms used by icograms Designer, so the results look right, not hand-wavy.
Why we built it
Isometric illustrations make architecture, infrastructure, network, and process diagrams instantly readable — but until now you either paid for a dedicated isometric tool or hand-faked the perspective. Meanwhile draw.io is everywhere: free, open source, offline-capable, embedded in Confluence, GitLab, VS Code and more. EsDraw closes that gap: isometric power inside the tool you already have.
Highlights
- Four isometric shears + reset, one right-click away
- Labels shear with the shape and stay in place on the plane
- Containers and lists shear with everything inside as one unit
- Smart connectors — arrow ends stay attached to sheared connection points
- Icograms-style isometric crosshair guide lines on selected cells
- Isometric resize: handles and the selection box follow the shear
- Non-destructive — one style flag per cell; "No Shear" restores the original, and undo works
- Small, dependency-light core, 100% unit-tested with zero framework dependencies
Try it
The live demo is a real self-hosted draw.io
with EsDraw already loaded — no install, no sign-up. For your own editor, build
dist/esdraw-isometric.js from source and load it via Extras → Plugins… in
draw.io Desktop or a self-hosted draw.io.
Status
EsDraw is alpha (v0.1), MIT-licensed, and maintained by Softalink. The roadmap includes a one-click hosted install, isometric diagram templates, keyboard shortcuts, and an optional isometric snap-grid. Contributions are welcome — the codebase is intentionally small and easy to jump into.