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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: 0.204s | 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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shagie ◴[12 Mar 25 16:22 UTC] No.43344855[source]▶
Mermaid - support in many markdown rendering pages. Embedding a ``` block in Markdown and having it versioned as text is the big win.

Graphviz - same basic reason as Mermaid, though no markdown support. Versioning text is a lot easier than versioning binaries.

Draw.io - if you've got to have a binary, this is it. In particular, it allows you to embed the drawing information in the image so that you can import a .png file into draw.io and get the drawing.

replies(2): >>43351034 #>>43351218 #
1. scrapheap ◴[13 Mar 25 07:30 UTC] No.43351034[source]▶
I'm a big fan of both Mermaid and Graphviz - Thanks to GitLab supporting Mermaid we can put relevant project diagrams inline in Markdown docs that live in the same git repo as the rest of the project code.

And if I need to generate a graph programmaticaly then I instinctively reach for Graphviz as it's solid and can produce the graphs in so many different file formats that they're easy to include wherever they're needed. Your code is a lot simpler as it doesn't need to handle any of the rendering logic, it just needs to work out which nodes are connected by which edges.