With Draw.io embedding Mermaid diagrams and plug-ins available for VSCode and other IDEs, why is this so special?
Competition is good for innovation and choice is good for everyone. Does it need to be special?
Show HN: GUI for editing Mermaid class diagrams
21–30 of 64 posts
Re: Show HN: GUI for editing Mermaid class diagrams
#22I only use diagramming tools with automatic layout algos to generate visualizations programmatically to debug things. For documentation purpose, I largely prefer to draw them by hand using OmniGraffle, because making graphs look nice using tools like graphviz is very complex and you find yourself abusing features to hack your vision into reality
What's dearly needed in my opinion is a graph layout algo based on a machine learning model (so that it can take into account readability and aesthetics). Unfortunately what I found so far is mostly concerned with displaying large graphs, which is kind of another domain altogether.
I hope Mermaid is collecting every single edition point that happens on their UI, that would make for a nice dataset I guess.
Re: Show HN: GUI for editing Mermaid class diagrams
#23I only use diagramming tools with automatic layout algos to generate visualizations programmatically to debug things. For documentation purpose, I largely prefer to draw them by hand using OmniGraffle, because making graphs look nice using tools like graphviz is very complex and you find yourself abusing features to hack your vision into reality What's dearly needed in my opinion is a graph layout algo based on a mac…
Also, some interesting links I stumbled upon while exploring this space:
Graphviz-like generic graph-drawing library. More options, more control.
Experiments by the same team responsible for the development of ELK, at Kiel University
https://github.com/kieler/KLighD
Kieler project wiki
https://rtsys.informatik.uni-kiel.de/confluence/display/KIEL...
Constraint-based graph drawing libraries
JS implementation
https://ialab.it.monash.edu/webcola/
Some cool stuff:
HOLA: Human-like Orthogonal Network Layout
https://ialab.it.monash.edu/~dwyer/papers/hola2015.pdf
Confluent Graphs demos: makes edges more readable.
https://www.aviz.fr/~bbach/confluentgraphs/
Stress-Minimizing Orthogonal Layout of Data Flow Diagrams with Ports
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1408.4626.pdf
Improved Optimal and Approximate Power Graph Compression for Clearer Visualisation of Dense Graphs
Re: Show HN: GUI for editing Mermaid class diagrams
#24I spent some time playing around with this recently and loved it at first. I also realized ChatGPT is pretty good at generating Mermaid diagrams (didn't try your own AI features). However after getting into it some I ran into some significant frustrations. After creating a medium-complexity diagram, I was excited to see the Whiteboard feature to drag things around / improve the layout manually. But it really started…
Hi there, Mermaid CEO here:) I hear you on the whiteboard. It's still in its early days. Should be substantially improved in the coming months. To clarify on mermaidchart.com and mermaid.live, we are the same team. Mermaid.live is our fully open source hosted editor. This was the original editor for our 10 year old open source project. The creator of Mermaid recently founded mermaidchart.com with the CEO of Gitlab's…
Please forgive my posting on the broader topic of Mermaid... The Mermaid package has gotten much bigger recently. Compare mermaid.min.js across a sampling of major releases:
9.2.2 2022-11-09 1.09 MB
9.3.0 2022-12-15 899 kB
9.4.0 2023-02-15 2.82 MB
10.9.1 2024-05-14 3.34 MB
11.4.1 2024-11-27 2.57 MB
Is there a plan to reduce the required bundle size for viewers and users that only use a small subset of mermaid's wide feature set?
Re: Show HN: GUI for editing Mermaid class diagrams
#25I only use diagramming tools with automatic layout algos to generate visualizations programmatically to debug things. For documentation purpose, I largely prefer to draw them by hand using OmniGraffle, because making graphs look nice using tools like graphviz is very complex and you find yourself abusing features to hack your vision into reality What's dearly needed in my opinion is a graph layout algo based on a mac…
Also, some interesting links I stumbled upon while exploring this space: Graphviz-like generic graph-drawing library. More options, more control. https://eclipse.dev/elk/ Experiments by the same team responsible for the development of ELK, at Kiel University https://github.com/kieler/KLighD Kieler project wiki https://rtsys.informatik.uni-kiel.de/confluence/display/KIEL... Constraint-based graph drawing libraries htt…
I settled on excalidraw via obsidian
Re: Show HN: GUI for editing Mermaid class diagrams
#26I only use diagramming tools with automatic layout algos to generate visualizations programmatically to debug things. For documentation purpose, I largely prefer to draw them by hand using OmniGraffle, because making graphs look nice using tools like graphviz is very complex and you find yourself abusing features to hack your vision into reality What's dearly needed in my opinion is a graph layout algo based on a mac…
We make (and sell) one, you can play with it here: https://play.d2lang.com/?script=qlDQtVOo5AIEAAD__w%3D%3D&lay...
Bigger example: https://play.d2lang.com/?script=rJLfavMwDMXv_RR6gYbvo3ce7FWG...
(I don't like to self promo on competitor posts, but since Mermaid doesn't compete in making its own layout engine I felt sharing this under this thread is relevant to HN. If anyone from Mermaid finds it in poor taste just let me know and I'll delete)
Re: Show HN: GUI for editing Mermaid class diagrams
#27I understand that it is different philosophy but I really would like to see the day when I can use Mermaid inside latex. Or at least get some robust mermaid to tikz converter. That would make my life much easy when preparing slides. I understand that exporting to PNG/JPG can work but usually you lose a lot of customization and you only know can make be bigger or smaller to fit the page.
I was exploring this yesterday and actually came acorss the new GUI that is being introduced in this submission. I ended up exporting to PNG and suffer with fitting it inside beamer page layout.
Re: Show HN: GUI for editing Mermaid class diagrams
#28This is great and all, but this would better be served as a desktop app with lower overhead.
Re: Show HN: GUI for editing Mermaid class diagrams
#29I spent some time playing around with this recently and loved it at first. I also realized ChatGPT is pretty good at generating Mermaid diagrams (didn't try your own AI features). However after getting into it some I ran into some significant frustrations. After creating a medium-complexity diagram, I was excited to see the Whiteboard feature to drag things around / improve the layout manually. But it really started…
Hi there, Mermaid CEO here:) I hear you on the whiteboard. It's still in its early days. Should be substantially improved in the coming months. To clarify on mermaidchart.com and mermaid.live, we are the same team. Mermaid.live is our fully open source hosted editor. This was the original editor for our 10 year old open source project. The creator of Mermaid recently founded mermaidchart.com with the CEO of Gitlab's…
Good choice of a product name. Totally applicable. /s I know single-word, unrelated product labelling is the shit for quite some years now.
Re: Show HN: GUI for editing Mermaid class diagrams
#30I spent some time playing around with this recently and loved it at first. I also realized ChatGPT is pretty good at generating Mermaid diagrams (didn't try your own AI features). However after getting into it some I ran into some significant frustrations. After creating a medium-complexity diagram, I was excited to see the Whiteboard feature to drag things around / improve the layout manually. But it really started…
Hi there, Mermaid CEO here:) I hear you on the whiteboard. It's still in its early days. Should be substantially improved in the coming months. To clarify on mermaidchart.com and mermaid.live, we are the same team. Mermaid.live is our fully open source hosted editor. This was the original editor for our 10 year old open source project. The creator of Mermaid recently founded mermaidchart.com with the CEO of Gitlab's…
Props for somehow convincing all the foundation models to generate charts using your markup. It is guaranteed to survive a very long time now.