Is this type of framework the future of email perhaps? For one I loathe long directionless emails and increasingly my mind starts wondering to something more structured to convey intentions and ideas - should add I am on the business side not an engineer.
Nomnoml
101–110 of 165 posts
Re: Nomnoml
#102this just triggers my entire spectrum of love for this text-to-diagram, but I always struggle with increasing difficulty managing content as the complexity grows.
I actually find this acts as a useful heuristic to bound the complexity of a diagram appropriately. For example if I'm making a diagram with Mermaid and find the code is becoming unwieldy, I take that as an indicator that I'm trying to stuff too much info into one diagram and I should split it into separate diagrams or redo it at a higher level of abstraction.
Re: Nomnoml
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
I use mermaid sequence diagrams all the time and much prefer them to using whatever app. GitHub can render them which is nice. Refactoring them is easier than dragging 20 boxes around too in my opinion. I've done a couple Gantt charts. I see they support c4 which I need to try. We don't have many options of approved diagramming software where I work though. Omnigraffle which I don't care much for, and Visio which doe…
I wish there was a way to easily export mermaid diagrams to PNG or PDF. Right now sharing the diagrams, especially ones that scroll, is a pain in the ass.
Since GitHub renders mermaid, you could simply share a link to a gist.
Re: Nomnoml
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
First you complain that people are asking for more free stuff, then you complain that they are asking in the wrong place? Whats your point? Aren't people allowed to discuss stuff other people share with them on the internet?
> Whats your point? Aren't people allowed to discuss stuff other people share with them on the internet? I think their point might be: such discussion might be fun for users, but could be unpleasant or unproductive for the maintainer. That's a totally different concern to express from "don't talk about this at all." Personally, the first thing I do with new software is see what I can do with it, and what I might want…
Philosophically, I try to embrace the zen of remembering that at the end of the day, while I would love to be helpful, strangers' concerns are not my concerns.
If I'm feeling overwhelmed, if I'm feeling burnt out, if the comments are too much or are unhelpful or are rude... I can tune them out. As the author, my goal was to solve a problem I had. I solved it. If the solution benefits someone else, that's gravy, but I've already put my energy back into the universe by sharing my solution one time in the first place.
Maintenance is a choice. Share and enjoy.
Re: Nomnoml
#105I made a few tools using nomnoml in the past, including control flow & dependency graphs for GPU assembly code. I really like it, the only negative was that there's no reliable way to push certain things to be positioned close together, so for extremely large diagrams it sometimes makes bad choices and it gets a bit messy.
The code is reasonably easy to modify as well even if it isn't fully documented, so I was able to hack in a way to have tooltips on hover, and making certain boxes clickable linking to other diagrams. I'm really grateful for this awesome tool being open source!
Re: Nomnoml
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It blows my mind though how the moment that someone offers free stuff, the first comments are people asking for more free stuff. If you create something from the perspective of "I had to make this on my unpaid spare time..", then requests for additional work do seem annoying. But is that the case here? If I made a utility I thought other people could also benefit from I'd personally be open to suggestions. I'd igno…
Do you maintain any popular open source projects?
I have one popular project I've worked since around 2010. Lately I've let some of the long time users who can also code maintain it though. It's a character creation editor for a game, a bit like second life in a way. (it's called pac3 for garrymsmod)
I don't have any numbers apart from steam workshop which claims 800k current subscribers, though that doesn't say anything about active users. But there are a lot of tutorials, discord groups, etc centered around this so I'd call it popular.
The way I maintain this project is not very professional. I maximize my own joy first because if I don't have that, I can't work on the project.
The community is loud, maybe because the community is also mostly young gamers. Sometimes I break things and people complain. Sometimes they can call me names, write long emotional posts about how I should revert something and how everything was better in the past version.
But overall I enjoy working on the project and seeing the amazing things people create with it that I could never foresee.
There are several channels for feature requests (github, discord, steamcommunity), but I don't actively follow it. I usually check when I'm not sure what to do but still feel like working on it.
Sometimes people contact me directly to ask if I can add X feature. Sometimes that works.
For features in general I try to implement something everyone can benefit from, since the editor allows you to create things from smaller building blocks, I'd rather make those smaller building blocks necessary to create the high level feature that was requested.
Re: Nomnoml
#107Really amazing, think I'll be using this quite alot now!
Re: Nomnoml
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
I use mermaid sequence diagrams all the time and much prefer them to using whatever app. GitHub can render them which is nice. Refactoring them is easier than dragging 20 boxes around too in my opinion. I've done a couple Gantt charts. I see they support c4 which I need to try. We don't have many options of approved diagramming software where I work though. Omnigraffle which I don't care much for, and Visio which doe…
I wish there was a way to easily export mermaid diagrams to PNG or PDF. Right now sharing the diagrams, especially ones that scroll, is a pain in the ass.
You can export to PNG and other formats in the Mermaid editor https://mermaid.live/
Re: Nomnoml
#109The language is very, very nice. However, if I ran into this incidentally (not posted to HN for review), I would never use this. I'd see the lack of a github link on the top right, and assume it's a some kind of startup making some prototype hosted tool. The only way to find out this is open-source is to click "about," read to the third paragraph, see github mentioned, click through the link, and click on the license…
I dunno, is it even still ...allowed... to have Free / Open Source software that does not live on GitHub? Because that exists. Though admittedly it's usually mirrored on GitHub.
If you're not freely donating your time and energy to improving the proprietary dataset that powers Copilot, can you even call yourself Open Source?
Re: Nomnoml
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
These markup languages are often not competing with "making a single diagram with drag&drop", though. Lets say you're making lots of variations, then having it in a specified format for easy changes is nice. Or diffing changes. Or programmatically generate them.
Lets say you're making lots of variations, then having it in a specified format for easy changes is nice. Or diffing changes. Or programmatically generate them. But in all those cases wouldn't it better to have something with an actual API in a programming language you are familiar with? Or at least a tool the takes something like JSON, for which there already are great tools for parsing, generating and manipulating.
These specialized grammars attempt to strike a balance between human-readable and machine-readable. JSON is a terrible solution because you'd have to have an id + dictionary, then a list of relationships. Basically, no human is ever editing that.