State Diagram Application

[Sal Ammoniac]

Anyone know of a Windows application that can be used to draw state diagrams? (Classic state diagrams—not UML-style ones.)

Years ago I used to do this using Visio, but that was tedious as it was a manual process. I’d something a little more automated.

[SiliconWizard]

Some people have already mentioned graphviz lately - it's interesting if you want automated generation from description files: automatic, but no UI, no manual placement, etc.

https://graphviz.gitlab.io/

Otherwise, I've tried a lot of stuff. Used Dia years ago. http://dia-installer.de/
Not particularly great, but useful and could export to many formats including EPS (which I needed.)

These days, I tend to use yED graph editor, which is pretty decent: https://www.yworks.com/products/yed

[tggzzz]

Do you intend to go from the pretty picture to the code, or the code to the pretty picture? Or do you want round trip capability?

[Sal Ammoniac]

Do you intend to go from the pretty picture to the code, or the code to the pretty picture? Or do you want round trip capability?

Pretty picture to the code. I don’t need round trip capability.

[tggzzz]

Now, what about all the bits that aren't pretty?

Classic examples would be the code for the actions executed in response to the events.

[matrixofdynamism]

ActiveHDL has a feature where we draw the state machine diagram and then can generate the code from it.

[rstofer]

yfd will draw nice diagrams but it knows nothing about state and it certainly won't write code.

https://www.yworks.com/

[Sal Ammoniac]

yfd will draw nice diagrams but it knows nothing about state and it certainly won't write code.

https://www.yworks.com/

That’s all I need. Thanks.

[Someone]

Plenty of simple tools for just state diagrams, but a more general solution which does arrows between boxes in wysiwyg:
https://www.diagrams.net

[SiliconWizard]

yfd will draw nice diagrams but it knows nothing about state and it certainly won't write code.

https://www.yworks.com/

That’s all I need. Thanks.

Note that yEd can save to most common standard graph file formats (such as GML, GraphML...) which are simple and documented.
So you could even write some kind of translator from the graph file to source file/code skeleton/whatever. Such tools may already exist, I didn't look that up.

[enz]

There is also plantuml https://plantuml.com/
I use it quite a lot to give small documentation hints direct in the source code, because eclipse (and many other applications/editors) can display the resulting graphic directly.