d2-playground VS TALA

https://play.d2lang.com/?script=qlDQtVOo5AIEAAD__w%3D%3D&ske...

I was going to ask why you don't have a web version but you already do. I'm going to play with this more today.

Have you thought about an "auto compile"/live mode where it changes as you edit the text? I think this adds a level of intuitiveness that would help new users explore.

Wow that's a very detailed catch, thanks for reporting! Made an issue: https://github.com/terrastruct/d2-playground/issues/33

A video can be a lot of work, it is quite challenging to produce a satisfying result. Instead, I suggest you to draw (here is a nice online tool to do that. If you prefer plain text, you can use d2) a Flowchart to represent your workflow. For someone who wants to understand a use case, it will be much quicker to look at a diagram rather than read or watch a video. And it will be easier for you to produce it.

We'll have our own API available for you to do this too. So you can make something on playground (https://play.d2lang.com) and then render the same way. E.g. https://github.com/alixander/test-render/blob/main/README.md

if you're talking about the playground, I did the initial version in a weekend or so (https://github.com/terrastruct/d2-playground), which includes building a WASM version of D2 (written in Go), putting a text editor, some UI stuff like dropdowns/menu, hooking it up together, layouts and responsiveness whatnot.

If you're talking about D2 language itself, ~2 devs over 3/4 of a year.

You can give it a spin to see if it's a fit for you here: https://play.d2lang.com

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.)