[russtrotter]

I used to often reach for xfig for a quick tech diagram (boxes, circles, lines, etc). The "fig" file format, being text, is easy to drop into source control. It's fast and gets the job done. The feeling I get from peers, especially those who've never understood that unix/linux on desktop has long been a thing or really lived that far out of the Win32/MacOS ecosystem, look at you sideways when the file extension isn't .docx, or .ppt or whatever. Maybe SVG supplants fig in all the ways, but I still hope tools like xfig keep their place for quite some time.

[nbernard]

> The "fig" file format, being text, is easy to drop into source control.

Yes, and using transfig it can be transformed into whatever format you need. So, for instance, you can have a complete LaTeX document with .fig figures (and a Makefile to "compile" everything) in a repository.

By the way, like Ipe mentioned in another comment, it is possible to use TeX formatting in xfig and the .fig format (using the "special" attribute) to produce some especially nice figures for scientific documents.

[amelius]

As someone who used xfig a lot, I have to say that Inkscape is a good successor, so I only look back for nostalgic reasons such as now.

[dubya]

The simple text format also makes it somewhat scriptable, so you could make more complex figures than you could make with a mouse, without learning Postscript.

[SemanticStrengh]

What are fig advantages over SVG though?

[dubya]

SVG wasn't an option at the time. Now, support for TeX labels might still be an advantage. These days I just use PGF/TikZ.

[thriftwy]

Then there's Dia with more focus on the tech diagrams.

[pjmlp]

I guess xfig could be considered modern when twm was young, and I was playing with IBM X Windows thin clients on our university lab.

[hulitu]

Well, xfig does its job well without getting in the way (like for example the new MS Visio). And twm was looking old some 20 years ago. Now, compared with Windows 10, it looks modern.

[SemanticStrengh]

I can't wait for skeuomorphism to come back