Tools for graphically editing technical figures (inkscape, IPE, texmacs diagrams, etc.) feel very much like Word, in that there is little support for abstraction of common details, and little support for high-quality automatic alignment. Although I much prefer WYSIWIG, TikZ is simply superior for certain things. There needs to be something like TeXmacs, which is visual but still is very high-level.

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@olynch cuttle.xyz has some really good tools for alignment, and parameterised generation or modification of objects. It's aimed at making outlines to laser cut, but you can do colours and shading, so no reason you couldn't use it for diagrams.

@christianp It looks really neat! This is definitely the right direction!

@olynch #texmacs graphics are not necessarily "visual". They can be generated programmatically from the embedded #scheme extension language.
See for example texmacs.github.io/notes/docs/s

@jeronim Oh neat! The thing is, if I'm going to be writing it out in text, then I'd rather use tikz because its more fully featured, and then edit it in emacs because I like emacs for plain text better. What would really make this good is if scheme could define objects that could be manipulated in the graphical setting, with specially defined anchors to make it high-level.

@olynch In the linked thread it is proposed to change the Scheme source coude to include a user-editable graphical object in the menus, but I think it should be possible to do this in a more user-friendly way from my-init-texmacs.scm.
It should also be possible to dynamically put interface elements on the toolbars to edit parameters of the object. Caveat: I haven't tried all of this yet 😀

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