Just as there are “classic” cars that never seem to go out of style, there are some classic pieces of software that remain useful long after most of their contemporaries. One of those programs is Xfig, a vector graphics editor hailing from the days of academic Unix workstations. Like the more famous TeX, Xfig hasn’t seen significant updates in several years—and for the same reason: it’s just about perfect like it is. It is showing its age in the style of its graphical interface, and it does have some fundamental limitations compared to more modern graphics tools, but for the simple technical diagrams it was intended for, it is still hard to beat.

Xfig is an older package, developed for Unix workstation environments such as SPARC. If you were using such a system to prepare research papers in the 1990s, it’s very likely you would have encountered it. The output from Xfig was very easy to incorporate into TeX or LaTeX papers, and this made it a favorite program among academics.

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