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

I've tried it now a little. The UI looks very cool, and generally the project is cool so congrats!

However, the generated TikZ code is not good in my opinion. Everything uses absolute coordinates, which in TikZ is seldom needed.

Just to start, if I place a single node I get absolute coordinates for it. Why? If you just write `\node {Hello};`, TikZ will put that at the center of the bounding box. No need to tell it's at `(0.5,2.91)` like it's happening in my test. Then features such as "align bottom" for a selection of multiple nodes should are manipulating the absolute coordinates instead of using TikZ's alignment features (anchors etc.).

I understand generating such code is more difficult. Maybe it can be something to point at for the next version, who knows...

If people are curious, I've worked on this project since February 2026, relatively consistently. In that time, through Codex, I've used around 700M tokens for this project (not counting cache reads), which at API rates would have cost $15k (but I actually paid only around $500 in ChatGPT subscription fees).

Ah, I love CircuitiTikZ. Only way to do simple text-based circuit diagrams.

https://ctan.org/pkg/circuitikz?lang=en

https://github.com/circuitikz/circuitikz

Some years ago I wired it up with `asciidoctor-diagram` so we could have simple circuits in our Asciidoc maintenance manuals. The techs loved the hell out of it, and we could collaborate on the things in a git versioned ecosystem vs whatever fresh hell the PDM/ERP had for us.

A very nice complement to the already awesome WireViz (https://github.com/wireviz/WireViz)

Neat! I also enjoyed https://q.uiver.app/ by https://github.com/varkor which is a bit more specialized.

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.

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.

This is cool!

I know people like it, but I hate writing TikZ manually, to the point that I've mostly moved most of my technical-ish drawings to draw.io/diagrams.net, and then just export to a PNG. I feel like it's inelegant, but it works well enough and it's easy to make something that looks ok. Generally I'm all for text-defined stuff.

I have moved some of my stuff to Mermaid when I know my stuff is going to live in Markdown but I've not tried to get that working in TeX.

That said, I would like to use TikZ just because it's kind of the idiomatic way of doing diagrams in LaTeX, so a WYSIWYG might be useful.

One suggestion, I would like the arrows to be able to "attach" to the boxes, as in the arrow endpoints can move when you move the boxes. That's how draw.io does it.

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.