tldraw SDK 5.5

Today we've landed version 5.5 of the tldraw SDK.

This release was all about reliability and small fixes. We’ve shipped some new ways to work with text and shapes, including smart typography and selection wrapping in rich text, as well as better handling for pasting links. We’ve also fixed a long list of rare bugs affecting interactions, sync, persistence, and the store.

You can read the full release notes here, or check out the highlights below.

Rare bugs

This month we sent off our most expensive AI agent to find bugs and inconsistencies in the tldraw SDK. We’ve spent the last month working through the findings, many of which were rare and special, some of which were even impossible to perform alone.

A class of these had to do with layered interactions. For example, if two transformations were affecting a shape at the same time, such as resizing a shape while another user rotated it, the result could be unexpected.

In this release, we handle those collisions better. If a shape is scripted to rotate automatically, you will still be able to drag it around like normal. The editor is better defended against deletions and other changes that occur mid-interaction.

Touch gestures also no longer get stuck when something interrupts them, like swiping in from the edge of the screen, an incoming call, or resting your palm on a tablet. (We explored touch gestures before, if you fancy reading about it.)

Mermaid diagrams are also much improved. Participant boxes now come through with their labels and colors, tall notes and fragment titles get the room they need, autonumber options are respected, and self-loop labels sit clear of their node.

Other improvements:

• Camera coasting and edge scrolling no longer run twice as fast on a 120 Hz display as on a 60 Hz one
• npm create tldraw . scaffolds into the current directory, and asks first if it isn't empty
• Keyboard navigation no longer selects locked shapes
• The right Shift key gives the large nudge step, too—no longer just the left!
• Frame selection works with a single shape selected, and leaves out locked shapes
• Arrow bindings no flip-flopping while resizing a bound shape, and arrow clusters move separately from the shapes they bind
• Fixed a range of crashes around lines and draw shapes with too few points, and groups whose children were removed mid-transaction

While these were some rare and edgy cases, finding and fixing them added more stability to the SDK overall. And to our surprise, we found that many of these issues had also been discovered by ambitious developers in the tldraw community, some years old. Thank you for your patience.

Smart typography in rich text

Text typed on the canvas now automatically gets smarter punctuation. Straight quotes curl, -- becomes an em dash, ... an ellipsis, and -> an arrow. Press Backspace immediately after a rewrite to restore the original punctuation.

Selected text is easier to work with too. Type an opening bracket or quote over a selection and it wraps the selection instead of replacing it: select a word and press ( to get (word).

Pasted links assigned to shapes

Pasting a URL with a single shape selected now adds that link to the shape instead of creating a new bookmark.

And more!

• Tiptap now comes included; you can import Tiptap’s extension API straight from tldraw
• An expired token no longer takes a room down until someone reloads the page
• Oversized messages now fail cleanly with a MESSAGE_TOO_LARGE error instead of disconnecting the client in a loop
• Long toast and dialog content wraps instead of overflowing

That’s it for this release! Thanks to all of the developers this month who opened issues or built something awesome with the tldraw SDK. Follow us on Twitter/X or join us on Discord for more discussion and to share your work!

And if you missed it, we’ve just shipped tldraw support in the ChatGPT app. We’ve also written about the comments feature we shipped in the last release, as well as the release of our summer intern project, tldraw flash.