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Show HN: Terrastruct – A Diagramming Tool for Systems

terrastruct.com

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Re: Show HN: Terrastruct – A Diagramming Tool for Systems

#32
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I thought about this as well and is something I originally imagined as a cool feature. The problem, though, is that not everyone will create a sub-layer for every component. It'd be a bad user experience for the viewer to have to just try clicking components to see which ones work, and I don't want to modify the look of the diagram, from what the author intended, to add some visual indicator that it's clickable.

Please do reconsider adding a visual indicator. Direct manipulation is a powerful UI technique and helps retain user focus. It could be something as simple as the mouse pointer changing when hovering over a component that can be drilled down into.

Hovering the navigation on the left could also highlight all linked components as well, giving a better sense of what you can drill into (without having to discover for yourself by moving your mouse all over the diagram).

Re: Show HN: Terrastruct – A Diagramming Tool for Systems

#33

Any thoughts on support for textual representation of the diagrams?

What do you mean by textual? Like ascii art?

In general I’d love to be able to export this to some non-web format, but I just don’t know any that fit given that there’s 3 dimensions (layers of the diagram, scenarios for each layer, and frames for each scenario). All the formats only support linear traversal (eg pdf pages, gif frames). Exporting as a directory of files viewed as a tree hierarchy is the closest I can think of.

Re: Show HN: Terrastruct – A Diagramming Tool for Systems

#34
post #32
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please do reconsider adding a visual indicator. Direct manipulation is a powerful UI technique and helps retain user focus. It could be something as simple as the mouse pointer changing when hovering over a component that can be drilled down into.

Hovering the navigation on the left could also highlight all linked components as well, giving a better sense of what you can drill into (without having to discover for yourself by moving your mouse all over the diagram).

This is an excellent suggestion, I might just do that. Thanks!

Re: Show HN: Terrastruct – A Diagramming Tool for Systems

#36

> This is an iFrame of a diagram [...] Why do I give a shit as a potential user that this is an iFrame?

because that indicates that this product has iFrame capabilities just for the graphs therefore you can easily add it to for example Confluence..

Just because you dont understand it doesnt mean you need to be rude.

Re: Show HN: Terrastruct – A Diagramming Tool for Systems

#39

Definitely an advancement over draw.io however isnt this just mermaid diagrams?

Thanks! Are you referring to this? https://mermaid-js.github.io/mermaid/#/

If so, that looks like the output is still single-image diagrams. The differentiation of Terrastruct is having an elegant way to aggregate what would've been many diagrams, to express something complex, into one.

Re: Show HN: Terrastruct – A Diagramming Tool for Systems

#40

> This is an iFrame of a diagram [...] Why do I give a shit as a potential user that this is an iFrame?

As shapiro92 commented, it's for the purpose of conveying that it can be embedded. You're right that I should make that more clear, I appreciate the feedback.
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