Show HN: TikZ Editor – WYSIWYG editor for figures in LaTeX

180 pointsposted 3 hours ago
by DominikPeters
(tikz.dev)

27 Comments

srean

7 minutes ago

Is their anyone here old enough to remember Xfig ?

I was quite proud of the hours of work I had put in to configure it just so, with the 3d look and all.

master-lincoln

2 hours ago

As a student I really wanted something like this. Thanks for making it open source. My theoretical computer science prof happened to be Till Tantau the inventor of TikZ. An awesome communicator too.

DominikPeters

an hour ago

Schleswig-Holsteiners are everywhere :) Till Tantau also started the beamer package for making LaTeX presentations. Both beamer and tikz are very important contributions to science communication.

sorenjan

an hour ago

Looks really nice. You might consider adding some presets to make it easier to get started, like some common neural net architectures and other use cases for TikZ.

DominikPeters

an hour ago

Good idea. There is File > Open Example, but it could be extended for sure. On desktop you can even directly open an arXiv paper!

delta_p_delta_x

2 hours ago

This is superb. Will you consider adding support for pgfplots[1]? When I was a student I was long considering writing a native application for real-time TikZing.

[1]: https://ctan.org/pkg/pgfplots?lang=en

DominikPeters

an hour ago

I think pgfplots should in principle be possible. I've postponed it thus far because pgfplots is GPL licensed, while the editor is MIT licensed, so I would need to distribute pgfplots support as a separate add-on. But in due course, putting in add-on infrastructure could make sense, because it would also allow adding support for stuff like tikzcd and CircuiTikZ (or tikzpingus!).

whatever1

2 hours ago

OMG! Psychiatrists are going to lose all of their graduate customers!

The world thanks you.

cubefox

12 minutes ago

That's cool. I guess it doesn't support TikZ' relative positioning (left of etc) because WYSIWYG features like drag-and-drop require absolute positioning?

DominikPeters

5 minutes ago

It does support editing it if relative positioning is used in the code, i.e. if you drag the object it will continue being relatively positioned. But if you add new elements with the various tools, they will be absolutely positioned (not sure what would be a good UI for switching an element to relative positioning) unless you edit the source. You can try with

  \begin{tikzpicture}
    \node[draw] (A) at (0,0) {A};
    \node[draw, right of=A] (B) {B};
  \end{tikzpicture}

GL26

2 hours ago

All STEM students and researches from the world thank you

__mharrison__

2 hours ago

This is very cool, but I'm going to say the inevitable...

How hard would it be to support cetz? I'm not touching LaTeX if I can avoid it, but I'm using Typst all the time.

adityamwagh

2 hours ago

Hey! I've always wanted something like this! Thanks for building this!

dvorka

an hour ago

I needed exactly this for years excellent work!

emil-lp

an hour ago

Here's what I would need: the ability to position five nodes in a circular fashion, so that they are evenly spaced.

DominikPeters

an hour ago

Intriguing thought. Of course by writing code it can be done

  \foreach \i in {1,...,5} {
    \node[circle, draw] (n\i) at ({90 - 72*(\i-1)}:1cm) {$\i$};
  }
but I'm not sure how to expose that as a UI in a nice way (maybe: if something uses polar coordinates and the user holds shift, then during drag the radius stays fixed, and I nudge towards even angular spacing + multiples of 15 degrees?)

e2e8

an hour ago

That sounds like the array modifier in Blender

Littice

2 hours ago

The killer feature for me is not drawing TikZ visually, but being able to touch old TikZ without turning the source into generated-looking soup.

DominikPeters

2 hours ago

Exactly, I wanted to avoid that. In contrast, if you open an SVG in (for example) Inkscape and make a minimal change and save, the resulting file has little to do with the original.

dima-quant

2 hours ago

This is great, nice concept! Good use of coding agents. Now I can make diagrams much faster.

hosteur

2 hours ago

Wow. I would have loved something like this when I was studying in University.

quantummagic

2 hours ago

Great job! Thank you for making it open source.

At some point the people who seethe with hate for AI, and claim it's all hallucinations and illegitimate hype, are going to have to admit they were wrong. Projects like this are the proof staring them right in the face, if they care to look.

Barbing

an hour ago

They’ve updated their criticisms since - bottom of career ladder disruption, skill atrophy.

(Not on HN but I do still see some folks who last tested LLMs before Nov ‘25, those folks might still be mostly out of touch.)

david_2107

2 hours ago

That's awesome! Long overdue.

k33n

2 hours ago

Wow, this is really, really great. Congratulations on an excellent offering and piece of tech!