Tikzcd – A simple visual editor for creating commutative diagrams | Hacker News Reader

Tikzcd – A simple visual editor for creating commutative diagrams

github.com

141 pointsgfredtech12 comments

Tikzcd is a LaTeX package for easily creating commutative diagrams with Tikz. This seems to be an editor which outputs tikzcd LaTeX commands.

Many thanks for sharing this though. It is very easy and convenient to create simple diagrams with tikzcd, but I often struggle to make larger and more complex diagrams look nice.

This is pretty cool! I would love to see this kind of tool (including the LaTeX output) available for other kinds of diagrams. Sequence diagrams, box-and-line diagrams, etc.

It's the type of thing I'd love from plantuml

It's not terribly hard to do by hand once you get the hang of it. I used to do my control systems homework with TikZ.

Diagrams for homework is easy. The tool almost doesn't matter.

What gets hard is when a diagram is describing something you don't have control over, such as a system built by dozens of engineers, or a product that is still being influenced by changing requirements. In those cases, I often want to build an initial diagram, then extend it quickly and in a version-control friendly way, or even in a way that can be generated.

Extending a Tikz diagram (by additional lines/nodes, I assume?) just means adding more Tikz commands to draw the additional parts. If you mostly use automatic or relative placement, the diff will be fairly compact. If you use manual placement, you'll get some noise from the adjustments required to make space.

Caveat: I have only used Tikz for homework. However, I didn't usually have control, and the diagrams occasionally had to change when I realized I forgot some part.

I made all diagrams in my thesis with this tikz gui: http://tikzit.sourceforge.net. Tikzcd looks more polished, Tikzit more general.

Is there any similar tool for string diagrams? They can be very expressive on paper, but it would be much more convenient to manipulate them on a computer.

Pretty cool, I'll definitely give this a go the next time I need to draw diagrams. I wish there would be a reset button for the line curvature and that ctrl-z would undo though.

Reinventing plantuml and dot I guess. Go have a look at those as well, they have their uses and are awesome.

I don't know PlantUML or dot very well, but it seems to me neither of them are visual editors? Also, tikz diagrams are used a lot in mathematics writing and presentations, which seems to be a very different use case.

This is awesome! Creating tikz diagrams by hand is a pain.

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