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Ask HN: Which tool do you use to create beautiful diagrams?

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Re: Ask HN: Which tool do you use to create beautiful diagrams?

#181

Post by rvdmei »

specialdragon wrote: post #27

http://plantuml.com I've been doing a lot of flow diagrams and PlantUML has been invaluable. I specifically like it because sharing the flow means sharing some text, which itself is vaguely human-readable. There's an online renderer (bottom of the page in the above link), which means simple diagrams are also quick to create and view. It's got a few different modes that it understands but I'd definitely add it to the…

I can highly recommend the PlantUML plugin for Visual Studio Code [1]. I mainly use this for sequence diagrams and component diagrams. The plugin makes editing and previewing the diagrams awesome. Also checkout PlantUML integration for GitLab [2]. We recently deployed this at work, so not many miles yet, but looks pretty awesome. Main feature is to render embedded PlantUML markup in text files (markdown).

[1] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=jebbs.pl... [2] https://docs.gitlab.com/ce/administration/integration/plantu...

Re: Ask HN: Which tool do you use to create beautiful diagrams?

#182

Post by rvdmei »

This is HN at it’s best, nobody answered the original question. Diagrams such as the one on the git-lfs site are most likely created with the traditional tools in the Adobe Creative Suite (or something similar). I have seen and used my share of design, diagramming and modeling tools over pas 20-30 years and until now I haven’t run into anything that ticks all the boxes. Usually diagramming and modeling tools aren’t the ones to make something look really nice.

Re: Ask HN: Which tool do you use to create beautiful diagrams?

#183

Post by lma21 »

eatonphil wrote: post #58

I've been looking off and on for the past year or two. The scene is depressing. Or there is just no market for cross-platform applications. However I doubt that is the case as over time there have been more fully-featured, once-desktop-only applications competing successfully cross-platform. (Figma vs. Sketch for example.) Draw.io is free but requires you to do so much work yourself to create objects, size them, grou…

How is Draw.io different than Visio when it comes to creating our own objects, sizing, grouping, connecting, arranging them?

Re: Ask HN: Which tool do you use to create beautiful diagrams?

#185

Post by aar232019 »

sridca wrote: post #115
sridca wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very interesting idea. Basically like mind maps but you can have structured content (eg: lists) in the nodes?

Wow, this app is really cool. Been using it to map out ideas about different things in my life. Thanks for sharing.

Thx everyone - our team is working hard to make something special... let us know if you have questions, complaints, or requests... Adam Riggs

Re: Ask HN: Which tool do you use to create beautiful diagrams?

#186

Post by Yeaw »

My plug, I'm the maintainer of a UML diagramming app called Gaphor https://github.org/gaphor/gaphor

It is open source and written in Python. We are just about finished porting it to modern Python. My goal is to make it a really fast, cross platform, and simple drawing and modeling tool, and it is already very usable.

Re: Ask HN: Which tool do you use to create beautiful diagrams?

#187

Post by eatonphil »

lma21 wrote: post #183
eatonphil wrote: post #58

I've been looking off and on for the past year or two. The scene is depressing. Or there is just no market for cross-platform applications. However I doubt that is the case as over time there have been more fully-featured, once-desktop-only applications competing successfully cross-platform. (Figma vs. Sketch for example.) Draw.io is free but requires you to do so much work yourself to create objects, size them, grou…

How is Draw.io different than Visio when it comes to creating our own objects, sizing, grouping, connecting, arranging them?

It was difficult for me to articulate in the original comment and still difficult for me to articulate now. :) Give it a try yourself, Visio has free trials. If you don't see a difference then it doesn't matter!

But it had to do with all of those items being very manual in Draw.io with little assistance. Whereas Visio auto-resized and offered connections and new elements very fluidly.

It seemed like it was taking me 20-30 minutes to do a simple diagram on Draw.io with good layout and sizing when it took me 5 minutes to do it in Visio.

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