Diagrams that align themselves

Every ask, newest first

Each line is an AI paraphrase of what the writer wanted. The link goes to their own words on Hacker News.

Reader’s note. Many ask which tool made a nice-looking diagram.

1. Apr 2025Wants to know what tool was used to draw the clean diagrams in a blog post. Read it: a comment in “Owning my own data, part 1: Integrating a self-hosted calendar solution”
2. Mar 2025Finds TikZ too slow and wants a better diagram tool than PowerPoint exported to PDF and cropped. Read it: a comment in “Ask HN: What do you use to create diagrams?”
3. May 2022Wants a diagram tool as polished and simple as Excalidraw but with more features. Read it: a comment in “I draw figures for my mathematical lecture notes using Inkscape (2019)”
4. May 2020Wants a diagram tool whose output looks as good as a particular project's documentation diagrams. Read it: a comment in “Create Diagrams in VS Code with Draw.io”
5. Feb 2020Wants a Linux or web alternative to Monodraw for making good-looking ASCII diagrams, finding Mermaid and asciiflow worse. Read it: a comment in “Markdeep – plain text documents with diagrams, equations, and Markdown syntax”
6. Feb 2020Wants a helper for drawing ASCII diagrams in the first place, before converting them to SVG. Read it: a comment in “Svgbob – convert ASCII diagrams to SVG, now with styling support”
7. Dec 2019Asks what tool was used to make the neat flexbox figures in an article. Read it: a comment in “Coping with Flexbox”
8. Jul 2019Is actively seeking a diagramming platform for system and network engineering, before one exits beta. Read it: a comment in “Show HN: Ilograph – Interactive AWS Serverless Architecture Diagram”
9. Jun 2019Wants a system design diagram tool that balances speed against diagram quality. Read it: a post: “Ask HN: What tools do you use for system design?”
10. Nov 2018Spends hours dragging boxes in Visio and PowerPoint and wants a modern IDE-like tool for documenting software architecture. Read it: a post: “Ask HN: Is there a better way to document complex software architectures?”
11. Jun 2018Asks for an easy tool to make polished flowcharts like the one in a report. Read it: a comment in “Norwegian Consumer Council report on how tech companies use dark patterns [pdf]”
12. Jan 2018Wants a simple free flowchart tool for Word and Excel documents, with arrows that align themselves. Read it: a post: “Ask HN: Flow chart tool for MS Office”
13. May 2017Wants a keyboard-driven drawing tool that feels like a mix of Visio or LibreOffice Draw and Vim. Read it: a comment in “Ask HN: Know any keyboard oriented drawing tools?”
14. Jan 2017Asks which tool makes the nice diagrams shown in a build system announcement. Read it: a comment in “Screwdriver: Yahoo's Continuous Delivery Build System for Dynamic Infrastructure”
15. Nov 2016Asks for a better tool for showing an architecture overview than UML. Read it: a comment in “Ask HN: Do you still use UML?”
16. Dec 2015Wants a tool to quickly make attractive diagrams like those in a library's documentation. Read it: a comment in “Apollo: Spotify's Java libraries for writing micro-services”
17. May 2015Wants a fast whiteboarding tool that also supports mockups and UML. Read it: a comment in “Think – Fast mobile whiteboarding”
18. Sep 2013Wants a good UML drawing tool for Linux or the browser, preferably usable offline. Read it: a comment in “Create diagrams in the browser”