This is correct: I like having full control over the application behaviour (at least down to the browser), and for a relatively small implementation like this, it's quite manageable. I make no claim this is sensible, but I've been bitten by obscure bugs in large libraries before and this way I find debugging is much easier, because I typically only have to worry about my own code.
I'm not sure I would recommend this strategy to others. It very much comes down to a personal preference, and I imagine using an existing framework would be much more accessible to someone starting frontend development. I feel I might get some stick if I were to suggest this to newcomers :) I'm afraid I don't know of any existing write-ups!
There's currently no direct textual input: I have considered it, but I feel it would be less efficient than the diagrammatic approach. Let me note that there is full keyboard support, which can be faster than drawing the diagrams by hand: you can see the keyboard shortcuts from the "Shortcuts" toolbar button.
You can move vertices by clicking and dragging in the empty space around them. I appreciate this isn't immediately intuitive and I'm trying to come up with a better way to reveal this to the user.
I also agree that fixing the view to the vertices with B can be confusing. My plan is to change this.
I think you should already be able to draw most of the causal diagrams from that paper already: you can use `\circ` for the white circles and `\bullet` for the black ones. Perhaps the only missing feature is being able to draw double-ended arrows? That's on my to-do list; let me know if there's something else that's missing.
I've been considering it. If you'd find a desktop app useful, please do open an issue on GitHub: that way I can gauge the demand a little better, which will help me to prioritise what to work on next!
Thanks! I use a Makefile simply because someone else contributed it early on in the development and it did the job, so I didn't see a reason to replace it. If there's a better way, I'd be happy to receive a pull request to change it!
- Crossing over arrows: https://github.com/varkor/quiver/issues/19
- Two-headed arrows: https://github.com/varkor/quiver/issues/37
I hope to get to them before too long. Thanks for the suggestions!