Dia - a Fantastic Diagramming Application for Linux

A lot of people who use Windows use a program called Visio for drawing diagrams. While Visio doesn't exist for Linux, an open source project called Dia capably fills the void. As one commenter put it, "Dia sidesteps combatting Visio diagram-to-diagram, polyline-to-polyline, however it quickly throws a chockful of the usual components-boxes, polygons, and snappy connecting lines and arrows- vital to whip up workflow diagrams, links of authority, and drawings of circuits.

I took a look at Dia, after being introduced to a new project called Teuthida, and while I found Teuthida simpler to work with in many ways, Dia is by far the more powerful, flexible and professional of the two applications. This isn't a knock against Teuthida, by the way, which was only released in alpha form within the last couple weeks, but is the reality of the situation. You may want to keep an eye on how Teuthida develops, but you'll want to be using Dia while you watch.

Dia can be used in creating a wide variety of diagrams (it includes not only shapes, but free drawing tools that make it possible to create pretty much anything you want), but does include certain objects which make Dia easier to use in the creation of entity relationship diagrams, UML diagrams, flowcharts, network diagrams, and if Dia doesn't have a shape to suit your need, you can import SVG (scalable vector graphics) shapes into Dia's palette to create your own.

I'm not a professional software engineer, electrical engineer, project planner or any type of person who has an everyday need for a program like Dia, but in my quick look at it, it seems to have a very full feature set. One of the things I appreciated most about it was the inclusion of a layers function. Layers would allow the Dia user to create virtual flip-books, showing a deeper and deeper look "inside" a project (a top-down view of a building or schematic, for instance), and makes editing certain aspects of a drawing relatively simple, as each aspect could be more or less self-contained.