Flowchart software for Raspbian

Question

Is there any low RAM and CPU usage flow chart software for creating flow charts on Raspbian? It would have to be a GUI software that is in the repositories.

Answer 1

If you must have a GUI, there's the venerable Xfig. It's old; I was using it at university about 25 years ago. It's reliable and has a large flowchart symbol library:

But if you want really lightweight, Graphviz is the way to go. It has a simple graphing language, and has a previewer, so you don't need a GUI. Here's an example:

digraph {
    label="graphviz flowchart GUI decisions"

    start[shape="box", style=rounded];
    end[shape="box", style=rounded];
    if_gui[shape="diamond", 
      label="Do you\nthink you\nneed a\nflowchart\nGUI?"];
    no_you_dont[shape="parallelogram", 
      label="No, you\ndon't."];

    start -> if_gui;
    if_gui -> end[label="no"];
    if_gui -> no_you_dont[label="yes"];
    no_you_dont -> end;
}

You can preview the result directly:

dot -Tx11 flowchart.dot

(Both of these examples were run on a Raspberry Pi running stock Raspbian.)

Answer 2

I can't speak to how lightweight it is but dia is available from the repository. It can be installed with the following command:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install dia

Here is a tutorial for creating flowcharts with dia.

Answer 3

The only option I'm aware of is calligraflow.

I can't judge whether you would think it low ram and CPU.

sudo apt-get install calligraflow

I use jessie/sid. I don't know if the package is available in wheezy.