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Pretty Fish: A better mermaid diagram editor

pretty.fish

21–30 of 32 posts

Re: Pretty Fish: A better mermaid diagram editor

#21

https://d2lang.com/ is a nicer language than Mermaid with much nicer visual appearance. It would be great if it became more widely supported.

Oh, finally, something that supports actual hierarchical state diagrams (that isn't Graphviz, no offense)... Mermaid's "You cannot define transitions between internal states belonging to different composite states" [1] has driven me up a wall for years. parentA.childA -> parentB.childB: voop parentB.childB -> parentA: vorp shouldn't be that hard! [1] https://mermaid.ai/open-source/syntax/stateDiagram.html#comp...

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Re: Pretty Fish: A better mermaid diagram editor

#22

https://d2lang.com/ is a nicer language than Mermaid with much nicer visual appearance. It would be great if it became more widely supported.

I agree that it's nicer and more powerful, but it's a little concerning it hasn't had any commits in the past 6 months: https://github.com/terrastruct/d2/commits/master/

I think the founder/lead developer, Alexander Wang, works at OpenAI now.

Plus, according to this comment on an issue, folks in their discord say it's not being actively maintained.

https://github.com/terrastruct/d2/issues/2735#issuecomment-4...

Re: Pretty Fish: A better mermaid diagram editor

#24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that it's nicer and more powerful, but it's a little concerning it hasn't had any commits in the past 6 months: https://github.com/terrastruct/d2/commits/master/

I think the founder/lead developer, Alexander Wang, works at OpenAI now. Plus, according to this comment on an issue, folks in their discord say it's not being actively maintained. https://github.com/terrastruct/d2/issues/2735#issuecomment-4...

Never imagined Scale.ai CEO was D2Lang creator nor that he joined his room-mate at OpenAI (giggle).

Thanks for sharing

Re: Pretty Fish: A better mermaid diagram editor

#25
I actually like Mermaid’s text-based approach a lot and wouldn’t want to replace it with a visual editor.

Where I do see room for improvement is the rendering quality. A lot of diagrams end up looking a bit rough, especially with arrow routing and layout, which can feel somewhat arbitrary.

Better layout/rendering would probably add more value (for me at least) than improving the editing experience.

Re: Pretty Fish: A better mermaid diagram editor

#28
Author here - thanks for all the support (and bug reports)!

I built pretty.fish with the belief that Mermaid diagrams don’t have to look like they’re from the 80s and to avoid squinting at Mermaid diagrams that coding agents create in tiny windows.

Having them on canvas also makes it easier to keep a track of, and even visualize agent steps as and when they are are being taken (if you connect an MCP you get a pretty nice view of agent building its knowledge graph for eg for a problem).

Didn’t expect it to take off like this—there are still rough edges (pan/zoom, mobile), but I’m working on smoothing those out soon.

Re: Pretty Fish: A better mermaid diagram editor

#29
post #26

Interesting timing and similarity with something I built last month! :) I built https://fishygram.com with a DSL you can copy and paste into ChatGPT to build diagrams for you. You can take a look at the examples to see what it can do.

I'm always frustrated by how bad LLMs seem to be at making mermaid text without parsing errors all through it.

Re: Pretty Fish: A better mermaid diagram editor

#30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the founder/lead developer, Alexander Wang, works at OpenAI now. Plus, according to this comment on an issue, folks in their discord say it's not being actively maintained. https://github.com/terrastruct/d2/issues/2735#issuecomment-4...

Never imagined Scale.ai CEO was D2Lang creator nor that he joined his room-mate at OpenAI (giggle). Thanks for sharing

Scale AI is a different Alex. Their first names are spelled slightly different. Alexandr vs Alexander
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