xstate VS Mermaid

XState is a powerful library with comprehensive documentation. Keeping the documentation handy while building your next app with XState will be invaluable.

XState is an excellent library that simplifies the utilization of actors in JavaScript applications. While this article focuses on using React, these principles apply equally well to other frameworks. In fact, they can be implemented anywhere JavaScript is executed.

In this article, I want to share a personal journey of discovery in the world of state management. My path led me to XState, a tool that I believe is the best choice for managing state in modern applications like React, Angular, Vue, and others. This isn't just a professional advice; it's a personal recommendation based on real-world experience.

You add the current user state to a React Context or state management library, read from it on the top bar, and write to it after a user signs in. Done. No big deal, right?

Lastly, I know that I've omitted many great tools like XState, React Query, and SWR. These tools are utilities that are very scalable in their own right, but aren't full replacements for a good state manager.

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