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Ask HN: What do you use to create diagrams?

61 points ttd | 1 comments | 12 Mar 25 14:14 UTC | HN request time: 0.202s | source

I've been working on a diagramming tool [1] and wanted to get some thoughts from people who regularly make architecture and other technical diagrams. I know my own experiences but I'm quite curious to hear others.

I'm guessing for a lot of people draw.io and Excalidraw are probably the go-to. If you use draw.io (or something else), what do you like about it, or what do you wish was better?

[1] - https://app.vexlio.com/ for the curious

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bqmjjx0kac ◴[12 Mar 25 14:24 UTC] No.43343584[source]▶
Graphviz! The syntax is kind of absurd, but it produces some beautiful results and can be version controlled.
replies(1): >>43343662 #
ttd ◴[12 Mar 25 14:31 UTC] No.43343662[source]▶
Definitely a personal fan of Graphviz as well! One thing I'm curious about are usecases that require version-controlled diagram sources. Do you guys have e.g. a build step that updates the rendered version somewhere? Or Confluence integration, etc?
replies(2): >>43343971 #>>43348485 #
1. SAI_Peregrinus ◴[12 Mar 25 14:59 UTC] No.43343971[source]▶
I'm not the person you replied to, but for projects I maintain at work we've got a plugin for Confluence called Mark. It allows using Markdown to create Confluence pages, which is useful because the company uses Confluence for some reason. For diagrams (Mermaid, GraphViz, etc.) the source for the diagram is kept with the Markdown & I've got a CI job that generates diagrams & then runs Mark to update Confluence.

It makes it a lot easier to keep the documentation in sync with the code than having to remember to go to Confluence and update things. And avoids the pain of dealing with Atlassian's slow-loading site.