Mermaid VS asciiflow

Mermaid JS is a tool that lets you create diagrams and charts such as flowcharts, sequence diagrams, Gantt charts using simple text commands. It works by converting your text commands into a graphical representation that you can customize and share. https://mermaid.live/

I'm not OP, but I just ask GPT to turn code or process or whatever else into a mermaid diagram. Most of the time I don't even need to few-shot prompt it with examples. Then you dump the resulting text into something like https://mermaid.live/ and voilà.

I like excalidraw for live discussions but if I want to make more detailed or better looking diagrams, I really enjoy these two tools:

- For drag-and-drop/WYSIWYG, I really like DrawIO. They have a web version https://app.diagrams.net/ but I strongly recommend the desktop version https://github.com/jgraph/drawio-desktop/releases/

- For text-as-diagram, I think Mermaid wins this by default since GitHub added markdown support for these: https://mermaid.live/ (This was github's announcement https://github.blog/2022-02-14-include-diagrams-markdown-fil... )

After hours without being able to solve this problem, I decided to make the chart directly in Mermaid's live editor and export it to PNG and SVG. The big problem is that the letters are still too small, the quality of the PNG is very low, and the SVG only works on the web, not with other applications like PowerPoint and Inkscape.

You can export to PNG and other formats in the Mermaid editor https://mermaid.live/

Copy paste code here: https://mermaid.live

> 7. You can put them in the source where they are relevant.

> Got a hairy state machine? Stick a comment at the top with something like nomnoml's syntax and anyone can follow what's going on without having to trace through the code.

For that use-case a markup graph language is a poor solution. Use https://asciiflow.com instead to produce something that people can digest without needing a third-party tool that may not even exist anymore.

Many diagrams I am able to draw manually as I'm editing source code on emacs, but for more complicated ones I tend to use this: https://asciiflow.com . To each their own, so pick your favorite ASCII editor.

This isn't at all what you are asking for but I use it in code all the time for flow-charting logic. https://asciiflow.com/ And on the plus side, the output is very portable.

Combination of: - http://maaslalani.com/slides/ - for slides - figlet/toilet/cowsay/lolcat - for generating titles and ascii art - https://github.com/lewish/asciiflow - for charts and diagrams

So I used this website: https://asciiflow.com to draw out the diagrams and then pasted them into the LCDs using the monospace font! An LCD is 39x58 "ASCII tiles" FYI if you wanted to do this too!

AsciiFlow