« BackShow HN: Mermaid ASCII Diagramsmermaid-ascii.artSubmitted by AlexanderGrooff 8 hours ago
  • virtualritz 3 hours ago

    This obviously needs a direct pipe into Svgbob!

    https://ivanceras.github.io/svgbob-editor/

    • quuxplusone 5 hours ago

      Some nits:

      The "Example" buttons don't jump out at me; I found them but it took a while. Also consider labeling them with their point, e.g. "Example 3: Color"

      If you change the input text to something well-formed, the graph seems to update immediately. But if you change it to something ill-formed, the graph doesn't update immediately — and then if you click "Generate" manually, it blanks the input box. Either this is a bug, or the "Generate" button doesn't do what I think it does (i.e. generate output). Again, adding a noun to the verb might help. Or just adding some usage information somewhere on the page.

      For those like me who've never heard of "Mermaid," apparently it's like GraphViz's dot language but different. https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid I tried the flowchart example from Mermaid's own README, but it didn't come out right: looks like the shape characters [] and {} aren't handled.

      • lordswork 33 minutes ago

        Counter-nit: I found the examples within a few seconds.

        • matt3210 an hour ago

          Same, I had no idea there were examples until I read this.

          • AlexanderGrooff 5 hours ago

            Thanks for the feedback! I agree that the web UI can be improved (quite) a bit, most of my efforts went into the actual generation of the diagrams. I'll have a look at prettifying it.

          • jonahx 3 hours ago

            Nice work, I love ascii diagrams. Especially useful when you want a visual explanation that can be embedded directly in source code.

            Small nit on layout: 90 degree joints should use "+" in the connecting lines, as they do in the boxes.

            • nunobrito 4 hours ago

              Hey, where are the mermaids?!?

              But now seriously.. the diagrams are working really well for simple examples, thank you so much for sharing this tool. I have bookmarked your page, my documentation is based on text files and often have to build these kind of diagrams too.

              The example buttons took me a while to be found, but are good for syntax explanation. Thank you for making this available.

              • AlexanderGrooff 3 hours ago

                Thanks for the kind words!

              • nlake906 2 hours ago

                love it, will definitely be using it for sketching documentation in comments for SQL sprocs, etc.

                One request: support for self-reference, i.e. "A --> A", "A --> A & B"

                • AlexanderGrooff an hour ago

                  Thanks, that's a good suggestion. I'm also noticing that's not working as intended.

                • piedpiper99 4 hours ago

                  I supposed it's good for basic usage. I just tried a more complex graph and it didn't render well.

                  • ewalk153 5 hours ago

                    This would be great to build into project readme workflows.

                  • octopusRex 5 hours ago

                    I'm disappointed. I was actually expecting lovely ascii art pictures of mermaids.