TALA VS C4-PlantUML

This is a problem with the languages, not a fundamental flaw. Manipulating text has a much higher ceiling than drag and drop, in terms of speed and simplicity. Every programmer has their own ecosystem for manipulating text. I can grep, version control, diff, jump with Vim key bindings, etc.

The layout engines are very hard. We've been making https://terrastruct.com/tala for over 2 years now. At first it seemed dubious whether it was even possible to beat Graphviz, but we've been designing it to emulate how diagrams might look on a whiteboard drawn by humans. That's a very different heuristic than the theoretical hierarchical cross-minimizations that previous algorithms strive for, and it's yielded good results for a subset of diagrams.

https://github.com/terrastruct/TALA

(apologies for this path. trying to strike the balance of making it findable for those who search for it while hidden to those who just want free.)

Third this. Don't look any further, just do it!

Also, PlantUML + C4 is like peanut butter & jelly:

https://github.com/plantuml-stdlib/C4-PlantUML

I'll gladly give up control of layout, and accept some ugliness, to never again have to worry about dragging boxes and arrows to be pixel-aligned, and then do it all over again when I add another box...

It looks like Mermaid has C4 support too:

https://mermaid.js.org/syntax/c4.html

C4-PlantUML: Export your model as C4-PlantUML diagrams.

PlantUML + C4 plugin;

Yes. I use this all the time for software diagramming. With c4 model (https://github.com/plantuml-stdlib/C4-PlantUML) and AWS icons (https://github.com/awslabs/aws-icons-for-plantuml)

The C4 model (https://c4model.com/) is great for architecture diagrams. You can use different tools to generate them. Here are the ones I've been using:

- https://github.com/plantuml-stdlib/C4-PlantUML

3️⃣ Text-based diagramming- C4-PlantUML

> onboarding docs

yes, they're don't changing frequently

> system design docs

yes - see C4-PlantUML[1]

> meeting notes

no, unless they're directly code related like ADRs [2,3].

Although one can abuse Github Issues + comments for this, in my opinion it's better to use modern SaaS tools for this, i.e. Loom, Descript, Linear.app, etc. - you can automate this process, e.g. transcribe the meeting's recording and add the issue/repo using Github Actions.

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[1] https://github.com/plantuml-stdlib/C4-PlantUML

[2] https://adr.github.io/

[3] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/prescriptive-guidance/latest/arc...