Comment 17 for bug 171027

I've spent all day looking for an open source (or at least free) application that can do this. Like others who have commented on this issue, I'm an electronics engineer looking to migrate away from Visio. I want to draw block diagrams of complex electronic systems. I want to create blocks representating sub-systems that have multiple named ports which connectors will snap to. I am happy to implement the named ports as text boxes, so long as I can attach a connection point to the text box and add it to a group. I also want to create other custom shapes (such as logic gates) with connection points placed in specific locations.

After a day of testing out various alternatives, LibreOffice Draw seems to come closest to providing this feature, however there is an annoying limitation where an object's connection (glue) points become inactive once it is added to a group. The customisation of snapping behaviour in Draw is also inferior to Inkscape, making it a challenge to use. Inkscape has been my first choice drawing tool for many tasks for many years, but it is just not usable for complex system block diagrams without the feature discussed here. After 14 years, its hard to believe we still haven't got this in Inkscape.