# TikZ

13 Hacker News commenters recommended TikZ and 4 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 8 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** People recommend TikZ for flexible diagrams and plots in LaTeX, though hand-writing complex drawings is tedious and time consuming.

## Why people recommend it

- Flexible enough for almost any diagram (3 comments): "it is amazingly flexible and can produce just about any kind of plot" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48259510)) "has the depth to build the most complicated things" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49860480)) "tikz looks super powerful" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49860918))
- Results look great (2 comments): "the results look much better than mermaid but still requires multiple iterations to fix bad arrows, bad layouts etc." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47832367)) "it was tedious and time consuming, but the results look great" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48654847))

## What people warn about

- Tedious to write manually (3 comments): "it was tedious and time consuming, but the results look great" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48654847)) "Tikz by hand for busy diagrams can be a whole lot of work." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48647985)) "I hate writing TikZ manually" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48649794))
- Hard TeX syntax, dislike of it (3 comments): "I have no great love for the TeX language [0] or TikZ" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47426457)) "strongly hate tikz, especially when drawing relatively complex diagrams like TQFT" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48604272)) "It's like writing regex, I don't want to touch it again after I'm done." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49573349))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Florilegium](https://hackerapproved.com/p/florilegium-procedural-flowers-in-latex.md): 14 recommend
- [Beamer LaTeX class](https://hackerapproved.com/p/beamer.md): 8 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "TikZ", https://hackerapproved.com/p/tikz/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).