TikZ

Raised as a usability problem by 9 people on Hacker News over 12 years (2014–2025), in 8 threads.

People raised many different problems with TikZ, 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 10 complaints

Hard to learn because it is used too infrequently to remember2025-06-23
Steep learning curve and convoluted to use2024-09-22
Author found TikZ painful to work with after brief use during undergraduate degree2022-05-04
Commenter is very slow at writing TikZ code and spends too much time on it2022-05-02
Wiring circuits requires naming nodes and connecting them, which feels unintuitive2021-08-22
Has to look up the syntax every time they use it2021-08-21
Hard to learn; the output is good but the syntax is very difficult2021-03-18
TikZ has a steep learning curve that takes effort to get past2019-06-16
Creating TikZ images is a horror, mastering it is nearly impossible2019-06-15
Arithmetic and control flow are painful to write because TeX is a poor programming language2014-02-22