Show HN: TikZ Editor – WYSIWYG editor for figures in LaTeX
Hi all! TikZ is a widely-used LaTeX package for drawing figures in papers. It uses commands like \draw[->] (0,0) -- (1,2); to draw lines, shapes, text, etc. Academics usually code up their figures by hand, so there is lots of twiddling around with the coordinates and recompiling until things look nice. I guess it’s a bit like SVG, but it’s more code than markup, for example it has loops with \foreach. I built an open-source WYSIWYG TikZ editor (available for web and desktop) that allows you to edit your TikZ source code visually by dragging and resizing elements. It simultaneously shows the source code and the rendered figure, and lets you edit either one while the two views stay in sync. I’m not aware of any other editors that are simultaneously source editors and WYSIWYG (even for editing SVG or HTML), and I’m quite pleased with how well the combination works. The way the app is implemented is by parsing the TikZ code, and at all times keeping track of the exact source location of each object. Thereby, when a user drags an element to a new position, the app can override just the numbers in the coordinate without changing anything else in the code (such as line breaks or indentation). This approach essentially required reimplementing a large fraction of TikZ, which is the kind of task that no human would ever want to do. I think building software that doesn’t exist yet because it would be impossibly tedious to code up is one of the great new possibilities thanks to coding agents, and it’s worth brainstorming for other examples. (This app was built almost entirely by Codex.) Implementing the app came with lots of fun side quests, including building converters from SVG / pptx / ipe to TikZ, re-implementing the LaTeX hyphenation and line-breaking algorithm to support multi-line nodes, and making a color picker that uses the red!20!black color mixing notation used in LaTeX papers.
Discussion Highlights (20 comments)
k33n
Wow, this is really, really great. Congratulations on an excellent offering and piece of tech!
adityamwagh
Hey! I've always wanted something like this! Thanks for building this!
GL26
All STEM students and researches from the world thank you
Littice
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.
__mharrison__
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.
master-lincoln
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.
hosteur
Wow. I would have loved something like this when I was studying in University.
dima-quant
This is great, nice concept! Good use of coding agents. Now I can make diagrams much faster.
quantummagic
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.
david_2107
That's awesome! Long overdue.
whatever1
OMG! Psychiatrists are going to lose all of their graduate customers! The world thanks you.
delta_p_delta_x
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
emil-lp
Here's what I would need: the ability to position five nodes in a circular fashion, so that they are evenly spaced.
j2kun
Neat! I also enjoyed https://q.uiver.app/ by https://github.com/varkor which is a bit more specialized.
sorenjan
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.
dvorka
I needed exactly this for years excellent work!
cubefox
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?
srean
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.
mcswell
I'm running Linux Mint (xfce version), and I installed the .deb version (TikZ.Editor_0.4.0_amd64.deb). It's very odd...for example, when I open it or do File/New, many (but not all) of the grid cells are rectangles, not squares. Am I doing something wrong, like installing the wrong version? Or maybe misinterpreting what the faint grey lines are?
cckolon
This is so cool. I would have loved this in college.