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Comment by cratermoon | Hacker News Reader

The problem with visual diagramming tools as far back as Visio, is how much of a time suck they are even for simple diagrams. If you're one of those folks who manages to stick with one long enough to create a stable of templates for common diagrams, you can become somewhat more efficient, but it's always going to be fiddly.

I've embraced the diagrams-as-code world, with graphviz, plantuml, Structurizr DSL, AsciiDoctor Diagram, Mermaid, and WebSequenceDiagrams all having a place. It's even possible to generate SVG using ruby or any language with a decent SVG library.

Yes, I had to give up making my diagrams "just so", but the time I've saved not dragging around elements, trying to connect lines and arrows makes it worth it. Being able to commit them to source control as text rather than binary files that don't diff is a bonus

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I've used most of these, and for the times when aesthetics don't matter, they're fine, though I find that automated layouts never really work well, and become too messy to make practical diagrams for most purposes. (Maybe this an area where machine learning could improve the algorithms.)

A new tool that has impressed me, though, is FigJam [1], which is a new type of document in Figma that's currently in beta. It's basically Visio, but with a fantastically intuitive UI and beautiful rendering style; super easy to draw boxes and lines and so on. Best of all, it's got real-time, web-based collaboration built in, and it's as solid as Figma (which is also fantastic).

[1] https://www.figma.com/figjam/

If you're really into shaving yaks, all the tools I mentioned allow for fine-grained modification of the aesthetics and layout.

Two questions about FigJam then:

1. What format does it store the saved files? Is it plain text, does it compress well, can it be diff'd?

2. Can I store the saved files locally and put them in the version control/CRM system of my choice, or are they all stored on Figma's servers?

Fine-grained, sure, but if I have to tell the tool how to do things, I might as well just fire up Illustrator. What I love about FigJam is that everything looks great with zero effort.

It doesn't do auto-layout, which is fine, because nobody does that well anyway — ultimately, layout tends to be a "semantic" issue that tools can't automate.

You can import/export diagrams as files, but they're in a proprietary binary format. You can, however, export as SVG. And Figma does support versioning.

If I understand correctly:

1, proprietary binary, it's not plain text, can't be diff'd doesn't compress as well as plain text at least.

2. files are stored on Figma's servers and I'm bound to their storage and versioning infrastructure.

on plantuml you can specify if the class should be placed, left, right, top, bottom. That helped me a lot.

Agreed! In my world of Asic design, I use Wavedrom[1] and Latex/LyX with tikz-timing[2] to make drawing timing diagrams less painful and more predictable and good looking to. Bonus, as you mentioned, they are source based text, and so can be committed in the repo.

[1] https://wavedrom.com/

[2] http://bakoma-tex.com/doc/latex/tikz-timing/tikz-timing.pdf

Exactly. My only issue is that if I have a high level diagram and create sub diagrams, then the sub diagrams look very different due to their own layout. But the time save is huge.

This is another reason I have settled on Markdown, R Markdown driven documentation and even presentation. The 2 dimensional presentation created via Markdown and Revealjs is much faster and looks great and best of all it forces you to limit how much content to write in a slide and I don’t have to worry about layout.

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