d2 VS mermaid-cli

While not embedded in markdown, I like d2 [1]. I can use it with org-babel to embed and view the diagrams on emacs. After using graphviz for years, the visual output seems more polished to me. With that said, I want to give pikchr a try.

[1]:https://d2lang.com/

In the next post I'll deep-dive into the D2 language which also has a huge set of features. Stay tuned.

That site is created by the maintainers of D2[1], so it might be biased, but I still think D2 has the friendliest syntax of the bunch, including nomnoml.

[1]: https://d2lang.com/

I've been using https://structurizr.com/ to automatically generate C4 diagrams from a model (rather than drawing them by hand). It works well with the approach for written documentation as proposed in https://arc42.org/. It's very easy to embed a C4 diagram into a markdown document.

The result is a set of documents and diagrams under version control that can be rendered using the structurizr documentation server (for interactive diagrams and indexed search).

I also use https://d2lang.com/ for declarative diagrams in addition to C4, e.g., sequence diagrams and https://adr.github.io/ for architectural decision records. These are also well integrated into structurizr.

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