TLDR: draw.io is groovy for drawing diagrams.
A while back I went through the tutorials for Inkscape and was fairly impressed.
Now that I sat down to draw some box-and-arrow data structure diagrams, I found that (a) the knowledge had fallen out of my head and (b) it was nearly impossible to figure out how to do things by playing with the program. I probably spent the better part of an hour trying to center text vertically within a box. A DuckDuckGo search was useless, because I kept getting videos explaining how to do much fancier things like getting text to lie along a curve. The only source that explained the procedure was, surprisingly, ChatGPT.
Clearly this is far too powerful a tool for my task -- like slicing butter with a chainsaw.
I looked for open source alternatives and alternativeto.net reminded me of draw.io. I had used this before, but been annoyed that it insisted on saving things within Google drive and manually drilling through my directory structure each time. Fortunately, there is now a standalone desktop app that lets me save things locally. It feels much friendlier -- poking around for a few seconds tends to find what I need.
@peterdrake I found Draw.io to be a really useful replacement for Visio - maybe even superior to Visio.
I thought you could always save and open offline with Draw.io too - was that changed recently?
