I'm working on knotend.com which is a keyboard-driven flowchart editor. I started thinking about this because I had a lot of large projects and I wanted a way to define dependencies between tasks. Most tools are pretty slow because they're mouse-based. Or they're code-based (like graphviz, mermaid), but not the same idea I was going for. It has auto-layout and uses a grid to position nodes. There's a selection and navigation mechanism a bit like a spreadsheet to keep things keyboard-based. You can use it without an account and there's also video demos in the top left of the home page. I'd love some feedback from the community, thanks!

Huge fan of this Scott My first "tool for thought" was opening excel and treating it as a whiteboard – I could just use the arrow keys to get to new locations – I'd have some pages with extra wide cells, some with extra narrow – still the best diary I've ever had Knotend already has great feel – the simple menus and default font seem just right – example videos are great – the undo is pretty killer – overall 🤩

Thank you, Christopher. Excel is great -- I love the videos and papers on the early design of VisiCalc in terms of using constraints (a grid) to simplify things.

Does it have a date picker?

No, but great colors ;)

Is it only for DAGs? Or in other words, can it supports charts like this one:

It supports directed graphs. You can have cycles.

Fantastic! I’ll definitely give it a try. Flowcharts are another occasional hobby of mine 🙂 Usually I use graphviz

Cool let me know how it goes! Knotend also exports to DOT so you can take the output to graphviz. You can also import DOT into knotend.

this is so cool. i am absolutely going to use this

Awesome, let me know how it goes!

This look useful. One suggestion is that it might be helpful to have the help button (or a shortcut) show what the effect of each node type operation would be in the context of the currently selected node. Something like:

Thats a really cool idea, thank you! And really nicely done. What tool did you use?

I drew the sketch in Figma.

Maybe I’ll try that. Im thinking roughly the same, but maybe having one graph per operation. With a text description for each as well. I really appreciate your suggestion and the time you put into it.