tldraw reuses its record-diff system to power its animation engine with almost no plumbing

max__drake · x · 2026-09-05

The tldraw team (@maxdrake) explains the approach behind tldraw flash, its upcoming animation feature: every change on the canvas is tracked and applied to the document store via records and diffs of those records (remote collaborators' changes too)—that's what tldraw is built on.

They "stole" that same record-diff system to drive animations: since tldraw is built to work with these diffs, very little plumbing was needed—the animation engine was done.

Related event: tldraw builds animation engine on top of its record diff system(2 posts)→

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