Ask HN: What do you use to write technical documentation?
By technical doc, I mean server infrastructure, services, network and code (but feel free to extend the discussion to something else if that's your specialty). I'm using a mixture of asciidoc and markdown. I like being able to have diagrams from code in my document (mermaid, plantuml...) Currently I'm using IntelliJ for that but I wish I would have something more adapted to documentation. Do you have any recommendations? I'm also interested in things related to technical documentation in general (good practices,...)
5 comments
I've been using Whimsical[1] for drawing charts and diagrams and i'm pretty happy with it.
I also use Markdown for writing documentation with Vim, very rarely i convert it to PDF with pandoc.
[1]: https://whimsical.com
I also use Markdown for writing documentation with Vim, very rarely i convert it to PDF with pandoc.
[1]: https://whimsical.com
Markdown and sometimes org-mode.
For illustrations, draw.io [1] and Excalidraw [2].
[1]: https://app.diagrams.net/
[2]: https://excalidraw.com/
[1]: https://app.diagrams.net/
[2]: https://excalidraw.com/
Google Docs + Lucidcharts.
The Docs format works well as the organisation is deeply embedded in Google Suite and Lucidcharts allows me to quickly produce architectural diagrams.Code snippets and other information can be formatted to make it easy to read and I use links where required to other technical documentation where required.
Is lucid chart integrated in google documents? (as in anybody editing the document can edit the chart)
There's a Google Docs plugin to embed them. They are not very clear in the doc but you can see a good outline and link through to the actual chart for viewing.