Flow Charts
Sometimes it’s easy to explain things with pictures, and you’re looking for a tool to draw pictures.
Usual tools :
What do we want?
I was looking for a text based tool. With my laptop, I preferred using a keyboard more. And I wasn’t comfortable drawing with my trackpad.
When I had to draw a diagram yesterday, I didn’t know what to do draw. I had to come up with the flow chart and draw it at the same time.
Drawing on paper was easiest, but then it’s not easy to erase or move around things.
dot
From the man page :
dot draws directed graphs. It works well on DAGs and other graphs that can be drawn as hierarchies. It reads attributed graph files and writes drawings. By default, the output format dot is the input file with layout coordinates appended.
Using dot
Install dot
sudo apt install neato
Create a dot file
emacs flowchart.dot
Basic Syntax
digraph G {
"create a dot file" -> "run dot `dot -Tpng flowchart.dot -o flowchart.png`" -> "Profit!";
}
Sample output
