d2-playground VS mermaid-cli

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

you can use mermaid-cli to create pngs/svgs

I come from past experiments with (py)graphviz, yed, probably a couple other forgotten things. (As well as manual diagrams in LucidChart and even Inkscape.) And am generally a non-web python guy.

I was looking at Mermaid last weekend, since a coworker has praised it a few times and I was wanting to play with it.

I think my expectation of how to use it was wrong? I typically expect to share my diagrams as .png files. The main documentation didn't seem to give much guidance in this usecase.

I ended up going to https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid-cli ... there didn't seem to be a simple install-and-use pathway similar to `apt` or `pip`, so I ended up trying the docker image for it. I got it working to create pngs, but I thought having to mess with docker volume mounts and defining my own aliases (`alias mermaid='docker run -u $UID -it --rm -v ~/mermaid:/data minlag/mermaid-cli -i'` so I can do `mermaid blah.mmd` in my ~/mermaid folder) was a bit cumbersome...

Just sharing to see if there's hot takes on where I went wrong, I guess. (for example, I certainly didn't extensively read the docs to understand the usage paradigm it's intended for)

node cli tool if java isn’t your thing. https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid-cli