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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!).
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?
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}
> not sure what would be a good UI for switching an element to relative positioning
1. Right-click on an existing object, offer drop-down context menu.
2. Menu item `Position relative to...`.
3. The cursor now selects _other_ objects in the field.
a. If there is no other object, then offer to create a new label-less node with (x,y); default to the origin.
b. Once an object is selected, then offer `right of`, `left of`, `north of`, `south of`, `southeast of`, etc as a drop-down menu, and a field for displacement.
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?)
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.
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.
https://www.lyx.org/
I was quite proud of the hours of work I had put in to configure it just so, with the 3d look and all.
What I loved about Xfig was that one could use latex and latex fonts in the diagrams.
[1]: https://ctan.org/pkg/pgfplots?lang=en
The world thanks you.
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.
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.
(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.)