depict
Mermaid
depict | Mermaid | |
---|---|---|
2 | 90 | |
26 | 3,605 | |
- | 3.2% | |
6.6 | 9.1 | |
12 months ago | 3 days ago | |
Rust | TypeScript | |
MIT License | MIT License |
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depict
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A CSS-Inspired Syntax for Flowcharts
One potential solution direction, which you can try out via my own incomplete drawing toy [1] is to treat punctuation characters like SP (“ “), COMMA (“,”), and SEMICOLON (“;”) as markers for the product operations of a family of monoids that allow you to specify more and more complicated sequences without requiring the typist to “move the cursor left” to add a matching character.
This way, simple lists can be specified via juxtaposition:
a b c
And then more complex lists
thing 1, thing 2, thing 3
and still more complex lists like
A complex thing; with data, and more data
can be specified in a way that is potentially still human-legible and easily editable.
Combined with ~instant feedback while typing and, ideally, a “brushing” system to allow selection of parts of the textual model via the linked drawing, I am hopeful that this can be solved resiliently, at least for the most common use cases.
(Part of why I am excited about OP’s work here though is that while I have done a fair bit in my own project on drawing a related kind of diagrams, I have myself only begun thinking about how to make the resulting drawings nicely stylable/themeable.)
[1] https://mstone.info/depict/ -> https://github.com/mstone/depict
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Ask HN: Visualizing software designs, especially of large systems (if at all)?
You might find it helpful to distinguish between visualizing the design of the system being implemented by your software, visualizing protocols being implemented by your software, visualizing the design of the your software itself, and visualizing important implementation details at runtime, e.g. for debugging, profiling, and operations.
For visualizing system designs, you should take a look at STAMP, e.g., via “Engineering A Safer World” + the resources at mit.edu/psas + on YouTube.
(Multiple tools, both commercial and libre, exist and are being developed to make these diagrams, although for what it’s worth, I mostly hear about people making them using draw.io, Google Drawings, on physical paper/whiteboards, or occasionally with specialized tooling.
I have also recently published a project in this area, https://github.com/mstone/depict, which I believe is well on its way toward addressing some unmet needs here.)
For visualizing protocols, things like sequence diagrams, data flow diagrams, DRAKON flow charts, value stream maps, and occasional more specialized objects like CPSA “cryptographic protocol shapes” / strand space skeletons are where I start depending on the flavor of what’s needed.
For visualizing the design of implementations themselves, I have not yet seen anything that I feel obliged to recommend; rather, here, I suggest investing in adding illustrations to your existing documentation in whatever way is easiest for you to use to clarify whatever subtleties you need to clarify for your audience.
(Here I tend to look at things like ASCII-art, SQLite’s railroad diagrams (now made with pikchr, AIUI), and sequence diagrams, as mentioned by other commenters, as helpful examples to start with.)
Finally, for implementing debugging/profiling/operational illustrations, there is a such a rich set of examples to turn to — whether from the very specialized (custom process model video rendering pipelines in robotics) to TensorBoard for TensorFlow to general-purpose tools like browser performance debugging suites, flame charts, or Go’s built-in profile graphing tools - that rather than learn any particular such tools, I’d instead suggest trying to get comfortable with the building blocks underlying these systems, which include contemporary GUI/web apps, custom drawing and animation tools like SVG, pretty printers, and Grammar-of-Graphics systems like vega-lite.
(Note: although it may seem superficially extraneous to your question, the reason I also suggest thinking about debugging visualizations in this context is because IMO, to work, they ~necessarily encode a visual model of the design of your implementation since it is the design of the implementation that provides the vocabulary and relationships that have to be understood and navigated in order to successfully debug/optimize/monitor any given running instance of whatever system you are building.)
Mermaid
- Conquering System Design Diagrams: My Shift to Mermaid.js
- Mermaid Live Editor
- Mermaid Chart, a Markdown-like tool for creating diagrams, raises $7.5M
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Using Mermaid JS to generate a diagram from Power Automate
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/
- FLaNK Stack Weekly 22 January 2024
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LLMs and Programming in the first days of 2024
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.
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Open-source drawing tool – Excalidraw
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... )
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I lost a full day's work thanks to Mermaid.
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.
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Nomnoml
You can export to PNG and other formats in the Mermaid editor https://mermaid.live/
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Creating mindmaps with ChatGPT
Copy paste code here: https://mermaid.live
What are some alternatives?
spekt8 - Visualize your Kubernetes cluster in real time
plantuml - Generate diagrams from textual description
ScrivanoForLinux - Scrivano is a notetaking application for handwritten notes.
kroki - Creates diagrams from textual descriptions!
shotglass - Tools to visualize large code bases in different ways.
obsidian-releases - Community plugins list, theme list, and releases of Obsidian.
Pythonocc-nodes-for-Ryven - Pythonocc nodes for Ryven
golang-nextjs-portable - Go program with embedded Next.js app.
TypeScript-Call-Graph - CLI to generate an interactive graph of functions and calls from your TypeScript files
DrawThe.Net - drawthe.net draws network diagrams dynamically from a text file describing the placement, layout and icons. Given a yaml file describing the hierarchy of the network and it's connections, a resulting diagram will be created.
plurid - Explore Information as a 3D Structure
wavedrom - :ocean: Digital timing diagram rendering engine