yEd is a beautiful simple diagram-drawing tool but it's essentially "just" a slimmer cousin of e.g. Visio: Click to draw blocks, join them with arrows, drag thi

yEd is a beautiful simple diagram-drawing tool but it's essentially "just" a slimmer cousin of e.g. Visio: Click to draw blocks, join them with arrows, drag things around with your mouse until everything looks nice. I'm one of those obsessive-compulsives who can be completely infinite-looped by any product that lets you manually tweak the appearance of your diagram by hand and mouse. "Another 1/8 inch to the left, now a bit more spaced out, oops, now this part isn't centered, so pull this..." blockdiag is different insofar as you specify the diagram by text only. It doesn't offer enough degrees of freedom to engage in the "creativity" that is so lethal to me. You tell it the names of your boxes and how you want them connected, and the software does the layout in a simple and unambiguous way. I also highly appreciate that this allows me to source-control the diagram in text form and at what is probably the most abstract level possible.