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 1 hours 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.
11 minutes ago [-]
sorenjan 1 hours 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 1 hours 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!
cubefox 7 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 32 seconds ago [-]
It does support editing it if relative positioning is used in the code, i.e. if you reposition 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). You can try with
\begin{tikzpicture}
\node[draw] (A) at (0,0) {A};
\node[draw, right of=A] (B) {B};
\end{tikzpicture}
delta_p_delta_x 1 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.
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!).
GL26 2 hours ago [-]
All STEM students and researches from the world thank you
whatever1 2 hours ago [-]
OMG! Psychiatrists are going to lose all of their graduate customers!
The world thanks you.
15 minutes ago [-]
__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 1 hours ago [-]
I needed exactly this for years excellent work!
emil-lp 1 hours ago [-]
Here's what I would need: the ability to position five nodes in a circular fashion, so that they are evenly spaced.
DominikPeters 1 hours 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 1 hours 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 1 hours 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!
I was quite proud of the hours of work I had put in to configure it just so, with the 3d look and all.
[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.)