SiliCoDraw

SiliCoDraw is a local editor for researchers who draw figures: posters, graphical abstracts, signaling pathway diagrams, flowcharts, timelines and teaching illustrations can all be drawn here. Nothing is sent to the cloud — your figures are plain JSON files stored on your own computer, so an AI coding assistant can read them and edit them directly, and you can also grab things and move them around yourself.

It ships with around 1,500 icons, with ready-made pieces for pathway diagrams, receptors and kinase cascades on membranes, and Gantt charts. Arrows can be marked as activation, inhibition or feedback, and legends and color schemes come with colorblind-friendly presets. When you're done you can export PNG, PDF, TIFF, SVG and even PPTX to journal requirements — and the text in exported figures stays real text instead of being flattened into a blurry image.

The project has 48 stars on GitHub and 36 commits, and was still being worked on as of November 5 with cross-platform fixes and bug fixes. Setup is simple too: one command to install, then open it in the browser and start drawing — no sign-up, no account. Figures live in a local folder, and history and exports stay yours.

A few limits up front: at heart it's an HTML file plus a small server, so you have to keep a terminal window open while it runs — close it and it tells you the server is offline. You can view and edit in a phone browser, but exporting and saving are less smooth than on a computer. And it's built for drawing together with AI, not for generating a finished figure from one sentence — if you want to hand the whole job to AI and be done with it, you'll be disappointed.