erd VS d2

I like it and the comparison site on https://text-to-diagram.com

I just wanted to drop a reference to Burnt Sushi's ERD tool [0]. It only does one diagram type: Entity Relationship Diagram. It's wonderful. Human-first syntax, code comments, and some simple formatting settings like colors and font sizes that help make more complex diagram pleasing and informative.

[0] https://github.com/BurntSushi/erd

Only tool I've come across is erd but have not personally used it. We use LucidChart for our ERDs at work. They have an API to export to PNG and to create documents within it. The documentation for the API is dense, but it is something I am hoping to take a hack day or two to try to understand and see if I can automate generating and updating our own ERDs.

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.