Mermaid VS neovim

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

As a software engineer, choosing and understanding your text editor is important part of your work, as it impacts your productivity and workflow efficiency. It's like choosing the perfect tool for any trade - you need to know what tool to use and how to use it effectively if you want to excel. For me, I use Neovim as my editor and I have been using it for a little over a year now.

This got me thinking about my recent pivot, my switch to Neovim by way of LazyVim to write most of my code, and using tmux to keep terminal states alive after closing a session.

Neovim: Make sure you have Neovim installed on your system. You can check the official website for installation instructions: https://neovim.io/ Git: We'll be using Git to clone the LazyVim starter pack. If you don't have Git, you can download it from https://git-scm.com/downloads

There are several ways to install Neovim. This wiki provides several guidelines on how to install Neovim.

All these thoughts I've shared, I would have them on occasion - but ever since I switched to Linux and Neovim, my curiosity has been through the roof. Switching over to Neovim and Linux was a not so fun weekend of configuration and spending half a day getting my work's local dev environment running on my new OS (which no one has tested development on). But I now have a deeper understanding of the tools I use, and have a text editor configured to be the most optimal for the way I want to use it.