The archive · Developer & Business Tools · Product decision · 2026
TikZ Editor's WYSIWYG bet: drag LaTeX figures, keep your code; HN gave 451 points
Dominik Peters built a free WYSIWYG editor that parses TikZ so authors can drag diagrams and keep their code; Show HN drew 451 points and 74 comments.
TikZ Editor
What the business is
A free, MIT-licensed WYSIWYG editor for TikZ diagrams in LaTeX — on the web and as a Tauri desktop app — where dragging nodes and paths edits the underlying code, and a full .tex paper can be opened with its figures edited in place.
How it started
Dominik Peters built the editor because parsing TeX is famously near-impossible, which is why no WYSIWYG editor for pre-existing TikZ code existed — tools like TikZiT exist but cannot import your own figures. With competent LLM coding agents the brute-force parsing task became feasible: the initial codebase was written by Codex models (gpt-5-3-codex, gpt-5-4, gpt-5-4-mini and gpt-5-5) over about three months, with some contributions from Claude.
What happened
The editor was posted publicly in June 2026 as a free MIT-licensed app on tikz.dev, and the Show HN drew 451 points and 74 comments. Version 0.5.2 supports dragging and resizing nodes and paths with snapping, grouping and alignment through TikZ scopes, foreach loops, a source panel with syntax highlighting and diagnostics, import from SVG, Ipe and PowerPoint, export to SVG, PNG, PDF or standalone LaTeX, and MathJax-based text rendering that reimplements TeX hyphenation and line-breaking. Peters released the converters as standalone npm packages (svg2tikz, pptx2tikz, ipe2tikz, xcolor-rgb-convert), and the desktop build can ask an OpenAI Codex assistant to edit figures.
No ending yet — it is still running.
Background
TikZ Editor is a free, MIT-licensed WYSIWYG editor for TikZ diagrams in LaTeX, built by Dominik Peters and hosted at tikz.dev. Instead of hand-editing coordinates, users drag nodes and paths and the TikZ code updates instantly, without disturbing existing line breaks or spacing; a source panel offers syntax highlighting, folding and error explanations, and whole .tex papers can be opened with figure thumbnails for editing.
The bet is that LLM coding agents made a previously abandoned problem feasible: parsing TeX is famously near-impossible, which is why no WYSIWYG editor for existing TikZ code existed before. The app does not parse arbitrary TeX — it parses the commands frequently used in TikZ figures into a semantic scene, keeps line and character tags back to the source, and applies edits as small patches so the author's formatting survives.
The initial codebase was written by Codex models over about three months, with some contributions from Claude. The Show HN on June 23, 2026 drew 451 points and 74 comments; since then the project has shipped a desktop build with an OpenAI Codex assistant, converters for SVG, Ipe and PowerPoint as standalone npm packages, and support for foreach loops, matrices, snapping, styles and multi-figure papers.
What has to be true
- Prior tools like TikZiT could not import your existing TikZ, so every author faced a choice between a visual editor and their own code; this editor ends that tradeoff.
- Patching source by line and character ranges rather than rewriting canonical output preserves indentation and comments, so the tool feels safe for real papers.
- Agent-written brute force was the actual unlock: TeX parsing had defeated humans for years, and months of patient LLM effort made coverage good enough to ship.
- Freeing the tool and publishing converters on npm built trust and distribution inside the niche LaTeX community without demanding payment for a closed editor.
What can be applied
Bet on capabilities the moment they cross the line: TeX parsing had defeated WYSIWYG editors for years, and LLM agents' brute-force patience turned it into a shippable editor in months.
Aftermath
As of September 2026 TikZ Editor is live as a free web app at version 0.5.2, with desktop releases packaged for Linux (AppImage, deb, rpm) and links for other platforms, and the code public on GitHub. The maintainer continues to widen the set of parseable TikZ commands and accepts issue reports with example figures that break the parser; no company, funding or business model has been attached to the project.
Sources
- Show HN: TikZ Editor – WYSIWYG editor for figures in LaTeX
- DominikPeters/tikz-editor — A WYSIWYG editor for TikZ that parses TikZ code
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