Show HN: Diagram as code tool with draggable customizations

Great project! You chose to base on Mermaid.js and that is indeed the most popular declarative diagramming library right now. A more versatile declarative diagramming approach is provided by the D2 Language [0], which may be interesting to check when it comes to supporting more complex diagram types.

[0] https://d2lang.com/

RohanAdwankar · 2 months ago

Thanks for sharing. One of the very fun parts of posting this for me was seeing how much bigger this niche was than I thought haha. D2 seems great and super featureful!

jasonm23 · 2 months ago

Thank you for making this and open sourcing it, the ecosystem for interactive editing of mermaid / diagrams is all the better thanks to your efforts.

malnourish · 2 months ago

D2 is better, but it's not supported by GitHub. Go where your users are.

SOLAR_FIELDS · 2 months ago

I’ve long had the stance that mermaids killer feature is that GitHub supports it natively. Ultimately for engineers having rendering at the place where they do the vast majority of their work is huge.

The actual drawing engine sucks compared to something like Graphviz. Works fine up until a certain number of nodes but completely falls apart after that

verdverm · 2 months ago

Render an image and put it in the repo, in this way github supports all sorts of tools.

Do you want to risk that your diagram changes outside of your control? (i.e. GitHub changes a mermaid version)

RohanAdwankar · 2 months ago

Yes that's essentially my thoughts though perhaps a later feature would be to support the tool customizing d2 files as well! I also think another part about starting with supporting mermaid syntax is that the AI coding agents seem to emphasize mermaid in particular [1] so if they are writing in that syntax anyways I feel it will be even more the norm.

[1] https://cursor.com/docs/configuration/tools/mermaid-diagrams

npm10 @10.9.3 (devel) Description: npm is a package manager for node. You can use it to install and publish your node programs. It manages dependencies and does other cool stuff. Homepage: https://www.npmjs.com/ Library Dependencies: nodejs22 Conflicts with: npm3, npm4, npm5, npm6, npm7, npm8, npm9, npm11 Platforms: any License: MIT Policy: openmaintainer

It's definitely much needed.

I use PlantUML for most diagramming but for anything with more than about 5 components in it I'm spending 20-30% of my time desperately trying to tweak the layout with hints.

It's an interesting approach to embed comments and then build that into the layout engine. I've always thought it would solve a lot of my issues if I could just lock the coordinates for certain components and then let the layout engine do the rest with those as hard constraints. This looks like something similar to that approach.

I really want this because the alternative is to spill over to completely manually maintained diagrams using GUI tools which then can't be easily integrated with source control - I want the same commit that changes the code to also change the architecture diagram for that code. Then it is part of code review and integrates to the whole process well.

Anduia · 2 months ago

I use PlantUML because it renders in GitLab's markdown, including wikis, MD docs and even PR comments. However, I have to use Mermaid for projects hosted on GitHub.

The hassle of tweaking the layout in puml, such as pairing elements with an invisible connections and groups, adding or removing dashes from the arrows in class diagrams... is gone because Mermaid is simply inferior in that sense.

Mermaid always feels like it's in beta and I don't understand why GitHub ignores the request to support puml (1). It seems that adoption of diagrams as code is tied to what is supported by major vendors and they don't care enough. Or maybe it is because mermaidchart made an official vscode plugin, who knows.

While I agree that improvements are needed, I'm not convinced that creating a third standard is the answer. What I would like is to be able to assign weights to my elements and let the renderer do the work (not set x and y coordinates like in oxdraw).

[1] https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/10111

zmmmmm · 2 months ago

Oh yes I'm completely with you on wishing Github would support PlantUML. It's almost trivial implementation wise, it's highly embeddable.

It's precisely because I do like it that I want it to scale up better to more complex diagrams. I basically can't push it forward as a universal standard in my org because it fails above a certain complexity threshold and I really can't push for teaching everybody a thousand ways to tweak the diagrams to coax it into doing the right thing (and even then, one small change and it may completely rearrange the output).

rapnie · 2 months ago

halostatue · 2 months ago

I've made a private MacPorts port[1]; if I find that I use it frequently enough, I might contribute it to the main MacPorts port repo[2].

One thing that's missing from my perspective (and this is probably true for Homebrew packaging as well, but I don't do that) is Git tags / GitHub releases associated with your Cargo releases.

I can work around it for now by using an explicit release (`9ccd9bf53f9a309ccda42b5c17e9c1056493fb90` is what I'm assuming was your 0.1.0 release point).

I've also assumed that npm10 is sufficient (which currently installs node22 on MacPorts).

[1] https://github.com/halostatue/ports

[2] https://github.com/macports/macports-ports

[3] https://github.com/halostatue/ports/commit/e7331a7fcae362b0d...

chrisweekly · 2 months ago

> npm10 is sufficient (which currently installs node22 on MacPorts)

Wait, no, node22 comes with npm10, not the other way around.

MacPorts separates `node` and `npm` packages like many package managers do:

The Portfile that I created specifies that if `npm` is present in $PATH (which isn't the user's $PATH because MacPorts uses `sudo`) then it should be used and assumed correct; otherwise, it says that the `npm10` port must be installed (because the instructions for oxdraw indicate that one must run `npm install && npm build`).

Thankyou!

vanilla · 2 months ago

This looks like a very promising project, I have been looking for exactly this.

One feature I would love to see a declarative diagramming solution would support is a hover pop-up with more information or nested diagrams.

Thanks! I think that sounds interesting, to make sure I'm understanding your use case would these pop ups be for your own use or for other people? For example would you want to send a link to someone else on your team and then the link shows the diagram with popups and nesting? Or would it be sufficient to send over the .mmd files and then the other person can use the cli to open the web interface which supports the popups and nesting. I imagine I could add the latter one quickly but for the former I would either add an easy way for users to self serve like with ngrok or some cloud solution. Or alternatively I could add some way to export the diagram just as a standalone HTML file in which case that could be sent and support the popups and hovering without the person you're sending it to having to have the CLI installed.

ilograph [0] has these features. I think it should be possible with SVG only. The main use-case would be for documentation sites.

[0] https://www.ilograph.com/features.html

gurjeet · 2 months ago

Great job on the releasing the project; it definitely solves a need of being able to use declarative syntax for defining the relationships, and then customizing the layout which the regular layout generators can't do.

Project's Cargo.toml file says code is licensed under MIT license, but there's no license file in the repository, so Github doesn't show what the project is licensed under. Please add the license file so that people see it without having to dig through the code/configuration to determine that.

If you wish to increase the adoption the tool, do consider hosting it to make it easy for people to use it. I see that it's heavily dependent on server-side code, so the cheap/free static hosting wouldn't be an option.

That makes sense I will eventually get to that!

Thanks for catching that! Just added the license file.

plmpsu · 2 months ago

I really wish PlantUML would just solve this jarring problem.

eagleinparadise · 2 months ago

This is awesome. I was looking for exactly this last week. A tool I could prompt AI to come up with an architecture and then be able to pick up manually, but visually not editing the code.

Being able to express a workflow or diagram and then have AI implement would be awesome to have a tight loop.

Great to hear! Absolutely this is the goal.

liqilin1567 · 2 months ago

Great project, I've been generating diagrams with llm for a while, and I often struggle to refine layout through the model.

But now I can interactively make changes to the diagram with this, it's very productive.

Thank you! Happy to hear that!