I used to often reach for xfig for a quick tech diagram (boxes, circles, lines, etc). The "fig" file format, being text, is easy to drop into source control. It's fast and gets the job done. The feeling I get from peers, especially those who've never understood that unix/linux on desktop has long been a thing or really lived that far out of the Win32/MacOS ecosystem, look at you sideways when the file extension isn't .docx, or .ppt or whatever. Maybe SVG supplants fig in all the ways, but I still hope tools like xfig keep their place for quite some time.
Really awesome tool, especially "back in the days".
Another great tool that I used for similar tasks, with a similarly appealing user interface and also a website that most likely works best in Netscape Navigator, is tgif: <a href="http://bourbon.usc.edu/tgif/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://bourbon.usc.edu/tgif/index.html</a><p>TIL: tgif files are Prolog
Also check out Ipe: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipe_(software)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipe_(software)</a>
I just used Xfig to make a diagram yesterday. There are other things out there but it was easy to learn and seems to work well enough. I just export to SVG when I am done.
I used xfig back in the day, but it always felt more like the tool I had than the one I wanted. It’s been a long while since I tried inkscape - I remember it more as a took for artists than for technical drawings.<p>These days my go to tool for technical diagrams is draw.io (aka diagrams.net). I tend to use the standalone version but appreciate that it’s available online with low friction and as a confluence plugin. Perhaps my favorite part is that you can create png files that are viewable anywhere but are also editable due to the source file being embedded in the png.
With macOS making it harder and harder to run X11 programs—I don't even know how, these days—is there anything that allows you to run an Xfig-alike on macOS? (I've seen recommendations for Inkscape, and I'll give it a try, but I was really practiced with Xfig and would like to be able to draw on that muscle memory if possible.)
This tool has been very helpful for me in situations where I need to create professional-looking diagrams for papers yet I have no access to OmniGraffle or Visio, especially during my student days when I couldn't afford licenses for those tools.
Awesome that Xfig still around. I used Xfig for the illustrations to my master's thesis back in the day when Inkscape was new, because it felt like Inkscape is trying to make precise alignment difficult on purpose. It still feels the same.