Graphviz

Raised as a usability problem by 11 people on Hacker News over 8 years (2017–2024), in 12 threads.

People raised many different problems with Graphviz, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 13 complaints

Defining nodes separately before connections is verbose and more complex than needed2024-07-22
Hard to visualise the diagram output from the code before rendering2024-01-21
Graphviz output looks dated and stuck in the 1980s, with no ongoing improvement2023-10-27
Steep learning curve with few examples to learn from2022-01-17
Visualizations become unusable once data structures go beyond toy examples2020-09-19
Clusters can't be forced to the first or last rank, so edges loop backwards into an unreadable mess2020-06-11
Must add 'cluster' to subgraph names and layout ignores settings, wasting days on hacks2020-06-10
Automatic layouts can be confusing or misleading, hard to make readable without case-specific tweaking2020-01-05
Diagram layout still has many edges that are hard to route and confusing2019-02-08
Mixing structure, styling and layout makes the layout hard to tweak2019-01-01
Can't figure out how to align boxes or straighten arrows2018-03-11
Properties and declarations mutate and propagate in unintuitive ways, with much boilerplate2017-09-24
Dot language is hard to compose; clusters are a crude workaround for reuse2017-06-17