Inkscape is a general purpose vector graphics program, designed to let you do anything.
Diagramming tools are there to provide you with a fast way to draw a diagram, which most importantly often contains connecting boxes with arrows that will auto-route and re-route when you move the boxes. I'm not aware of Inkscape supporting that, and I suspect that even if it somehow does, it'll require many more clicks.
Draw.io is good enough for a one-off usecase, but if you're creating a couple diagrams and consider your time to have monetary value, the better usability of Figma means it'll pay for itself really quickly.
Last time I checked (yesterday), I could not find that. Am I missing anything?
It's by no means a full replacement for the sorts of tools you'd get in Draw.io but it's not nothing.
It lets you create a two-node SVG path with a bit of extra metadata. One or both nodes connect to a special node at the centre of a shape.
Inkscape automatically makes that be a straight line trimmed to the edges of the shape(s. You can move the shapes and have the line move too. If you move the path itself it turns back into a regular path.
The path is just a straight line as mentioned and there's certainly no routing logic.
I may prefer something like excalidraw as a quick diagramming tool, but if you already have a hammer which is paid for, has SSO and access control set up, etc, many things take the shape of a nail.
> one of the best snapping systems ever created
Not the best though. That honour goes to IPE.
IPE is also a pretty good diagram editor, though it is quite heavily tied to LaTeX and more oriented towards maths / geometry diagrams than technical block diagrams. Draw.io is best for the latter, except for the stupid limitation that you can't really export text objects to real SVG as mentioned in the article. It just embeds HTML objects in the SVG which means they only work in browsers.
> Not the best though. That honour goes to IPE.
Never heard of IPE, I am going to check it out, thanks.
Is this documented somewhere? inkscape.org points to inkscape-manuals.readthedocs.io which doesn't cover it at all. I can't even get it to snap to an anchor if the grid is showing, and I can't get it to snap to the grid if the view isn't zoomed close enough.
So this not rules out that he didn't at some point. But still to my graphic designer eyes choosing either Inkscape (and even more, Figma) for doing simple diagrams is really, really weird.
* Disclaimer: I'm a heavy Inkscape user, it's been one of my main tools for all of uni and my professional work since 2006 - yes, it has some unpolished details here and there, but still it's great and (for me) miles better than any paid non-free tool