I used Ipe as an alternative to TikZ package for LaTeX. Ipe is a great tool that allows some manual moving of chart's components but can also be edited through code. You can insert formulas using LaTeX typesetting. It's also much easier to use for a complete beginner than TikZ. Highly recommend giving it a shot if you found TikZ to be too time-consuming.

I use ipe all the time. Perfect for making schematics for research papers.

Ipe is a nice power tool - I learned to use it in grad school and have used it to draw technical illustrations that are essentially polished sketches. For example Figures 1 through 8 in this paper: https://users.cs.duke.edu/~pankaj/publications/papers/flood-...

Other people like TikZ, but the kinds of illustrations I gravitate towards rarely have a neat exact compass and straightedge feel that lends itself to coding in TikZ (e.g. Figure 4). Then for certain figures I have used Ipe as an intermediate language similar to SVG, where I would write a Python program to produce some precise drawing that I could then tweak by hand in the Ipe GUI (e.g. Figure 2).

Back in our day, you wanted figures in your (La)TeX files you used xfig and cursed a lot.

Are there any screenshots of the user interface, or is it solely a language (despite the manual describing selections and mouse interaction)?

It's a quite distinct GUI - there's not really any screenshots in the official materials, but if you do a Google image search for "ipe" "latex" then you can see what it looks like.

Wikipedia has a screenshot:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipe_(software)#/media/File:Ipe...

But that's Ipe 6 so a few years out of date.

I’m yet to understand how a tool to create graphic drawings does not provide any trace of a screenshot of example outputs in their website; and upon reading this very comment section, I learned it has a GUI, of which of course there is not a screenshot either in their page. Go figure