DrawIt VS SVG++

People that liked this post may also be interested in drawit, a vim plugin that helps you create ascii diagrams.

https://github.com/vim-scripts/DrawIt

Probably not exactly what you're looking for, but something you might find useful is the DrawIt plugin for vim. You can enter a drawing "mode" and can easily draw lines, arrows, boxes, etc. using either ASCII characters or Unicode line segments. This isn't a replacement for a full UML diagram, but can be handy for things like state diagrams or truth tables in comments.

Congratulations, now you replaced a trivial file format that (from a quick glance at the code) needed about ~35 of easily readable and self-contained Lua code to parse with an external dependency that would be much larger and harder to follow and either having (at least) an XML parser as its own dependency or implementing its own XML parsing, as well as being at the mercy of their developers. Also unless you are using some highly popular library, you may end up with some abandoned dependency.

Examples of both are at [0] (C++ based parser, you'd also need to write some bindings for lua) and [1] (Lua based parser for a subset of the format, abandoned for almost a decade).

There are times when using an external dependency might be a good idea, but a text-based file format that describes lines and can be implemented in a few lines of code is not one.

[0] https://github.com/svgpp/svgpp

[1] https://github.com/luapower/svg_parser