Birbla

Discussion summary

A free Mermaid diagram editor is appreciated for its simplicity, though some users find the ecosystem lacking. Alternatives like Kroki and AI tools are also mentioned.

What the discussion says

  • Some users criticize the official editor for paywalling features.
  • AI can generate Mermaid diagrams effectively, reducing the need for dedicated tools.
  • Kroki.io offers multiple diagram formats including Mermaid.
  • Mermaid is popular for AI workflows and charting.
  • Users express frustration with Mermaid's ecosystem and usability.
“Mermaid has become the de facto charting language when working with AI.”
— stronglikedan
“The ecosystem absolutely sucks.”
— rdwrrr

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  • Hacker News
  • Probably because the official editor sucks after paywalling features and steering you into signing up.
    by nonethewiser
  • The only problem with mermaid that GitHub UI renders it poorly. Large diagrams very difficult to view. Any solution for that?
    by k1r111
  • https://kroki.io/#try

    Shout out to Kroki, which offers Mermaid and many other text-based diagramming formats.

    by thangalin
  • Handy.

    I've been (very loosely) trying to get AI to generate diagrams for a while, and even Copilot can't get Visio's file format correct enough to allow Visio to open it successfully.

    This is a nice clean interface I can just paste attempts into. Thank you!

    by BLKNSLVR
  • just get ai to generate mermaid, it's super competent at doing it, you don't really need any other tools.
    by keithnz
  • Yeah the main product I'm working on (Moxie Docs) has AI generation of mermaid diagrams, I find that it works __well enough__ but I needed some strong guardrails, quality checks, and templating to make sure it doesn't generate broken diagrams (or useless ones). First few iterations it would create a diagram for everything and it was a bit zealous on when it decided diagrams would be useful.
    by ghosts_
  • I created https://smalldocs.org to help with this. After installing you can tell your agent to "sdoc me a mermaid diagram of X flow" or "sdoc me a visual architecture of this repo" or something, and it handles it nicely (imo!).

    Here is the mermaid diagram gallery: https://smalldocs.org/s/PpArByXuNBA5kGS1JVMUW6#k=uTqNRLqzz_T...

    Code available: https://github.com/espressoplease/smalldocs

    Discord: https://discord.gg/txjATTsDaq

    by FailMore
  • Question for mermaid users out there. I have not used mermaid more than just superficially looking at it but it looks to me like a re-implementation of graphviz? Which has been around forever. Is there something it does that makes it more appealing?

    I am not knocking this Free Mermaid Diagram Editor either. Seems decent. But, similarly, edotor has been around forever.

    https://edotor.net/

    by hackthemack
  • It does more types of charts, including Gantt charts. Very useful.
    by dTal
  • Mermaid has become the de facto charting language when working with AI, so it has been elevated to the chosen one, like Python.
    by stronglikedan
  • Thanks for dropping this here. I have been frustrated for quite some time. I blindly followed the advice to learn some mermaid. Then I discovered that the ecosystem absolutely sucks.
    by rdwrrr