TikZ
Hacker ApprovedRanked 2 of 3 LaTeX packages by recommenders
People recommend TikZ for flexible diagrams and plots in LaTeX, though hand-writing complex drawings is tedious and time consuming.
People recommend TikZ for flexible diagrams and plots in LaTeX, though hand-writing complex drawings is tedious and time consuming.
17 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 13
- criticize it
- 4
- approval share
- 76%
Recommended in 8 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 13 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 3.3 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 8 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Flexible enough for almost any diagram
“it is amazingly flexible and can produce just about any kind of plot”
Comment from 24 May 2026 in “I spent 50 hours drawing a line graph” “has the depth to build the most complicated things”
Comment from 26 Sep 2026 in “Show HN: Reladraw – A diagram language where you decide where to place things” “tikz looks super powerful”
Comment from 26 Sep 2026 in “Show HN: Reladraw – A diagram language where you decide where to place things” Results look great
“the results look much better than mermaid but still requires multiple iterations to fix bad arrows, bad layouts etc.”
Comment from 20 Apr 2026 in “Show HN: Prompt-to-Excalidraw demo with Gemma 4 E2B in the browser (3.1GB)” “it was tedious and time consuming, but the results look great”
Comment from 24 Jun 2026 in “Show HN: TikZ Editor – WYSIWYG editor for figures in LaTeX”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Tedious to write manually
“it was tedious and time consuming, but the results look great”
Comment from 24 Jun 2026 in “Show HN: TikZ Editor – WYSIWYG editor for figures in LaTeX” “Tikz by hand for busy diagrams can be a whole lot of work.”
Comment from 23 Jun 2026 in “Show HN: TikZ Editor – WYSIWYG editor for figures in LaTeX” “I hate writing TikZ manually”
Comment from 23 Jun 2026 in “Show HN: TikZ Editor – WYSIWYG editor for figures in LaTeX” Hard TeX syntax, dislike of it
“I have no great love for the TeX language [0] or TikZ”
Comment from 18 Mar 2026 in “Slug Text Rendering Algorithm Dedicated to Public Domain” “strongly hate tikz, especially when drawing relatively complex diagrams like TQFT”
Comment from 19 Jun 2026 in “Gribouille 0.3.0: A Grammar of Graphics for Typst” “It's like writing regex, I don't want to touch it again after I'm done.”
Comment from 5 Sep 2026 in “ExactTex. A gradually-typed superset of LaTeX”
Other LaTeX packages people recommend
The two most recommended other LaTeX packages, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Florilegium | 14 | 1 | 93% | 1 | — | — |
| TikZThis page | 13 | 4 | 76% | 8 | — | Approved |
| Beamer LaTeX class | 8 | 0 | 100% | 5 | — | — |
What people said
18 of the 19 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“tikz looks super powerful”
“has the depth to build the most complicated things”
“It's like writing regex, I don't want to touch it again after I'm done.”
“My drugs of choice are tikz and openscad”
“TikZ works, with some wiring.”
“it was tedious and time consuming, but the results look great”
“I hate writing TikZ manually”
“Tikz by hand for busy diagrams can be a whole lot of work.”
“Both beamer and tikz are very important contributions to science communication.”
“strongly hate tikz, especially when drawing relatively complex diagrams like TQFT”
“The next hardest thing was switching from TikZ to Cetz.”
“it is amazingly flexible and can produce just about any kind of plot”
“the results look much better than mermaid but still requires multiple iterations to fix bad arrows, bad layouts etc.”
“Another option I use open is to ask the ode-agent to make a diagram using Tikz”
“I have no great love for the TeX language [0] or TikZ”
“Ti k Z has native and full support for ConTeXt”
“I had to use TiKZ and import the resulting PDFs for some of the more complex illustrations in my thesis”
“TikZ is often outside the ability of GPT5 to successfully write or debug”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.