71–80 of 83 posts
Excalidraw for life. It can be embedded in Obsidian as well. Draw.io is OK too, but the interaction is much slower when editing. The strict position/shape of arrows makes me want to clean things up way more than necessary and waste time. I'd maybe consider miro or draw.io if I was working on something with other people and expected lots of edits and change history. Mermaid is an interesting concept, but putting thing…
- To be open source, or open specification/format.
- Easy eaditable (gui/tui/source), that is, primitives. I don't want to edit a text based diagram with a text editor (emacs artist mode).
- Free design features, so I have some control on the presentation.
- Render to text diagram as a first class feature, so it can be integrated in source code/control. From text rendering it can easily be converted to vectorial/raster.
- CLI to render.
- DSL, better with geometric (position, size) and styling features (color, bold face, ...).
I have found nothing that meets these criteria.
I'm actually using https://metacpan.org/pod/App::Asciio as the best approach.
schemdraw (python library) is a library for drawing beautiful circuit diagrams. It has a surprisingly effective flowchart part as well, that allows you even to draw custom beziers arrows and stuff. You can do manual positioning of everything, which is sometimes an anonoyance with mermaid. Outputs to svg or png. https://schemdraw.readthedocs.io/en/stable/
matplotlib (python library), people know it for drawing charts and such things, but if you want to build your own drawings that deviate strongly from existing solutions, all the drawing primitives are in there. See for example: https://matplotlib.org/matplotblog/posts/mpl-for-making-diag...
And for just wrapping your head around something, a piece of paper and a sharpened pencil are surprisingly effective at not wasting your time.
Some quick notes about your app:
- No touch zoom/pan. Apart from that it worked okay on a Galaxy Note phone with the pen.
- I managed to make a shape vanish by (I think) rotating it quickly. I couldn't repeat that.
- The polyline selection seems quite broken. Draw a shape, then draw a polyline around it. Now you can't select the first shape, even though it's not obscured by anything.
Also, https://draw.io/