Render Mermaid diagrams as SVGs or ASCII art

I've worked on a similar project, but instead of going the ASCII route, we decided to lean into interactivity for code exploration. The angle is more around empowering human understanding, instead of agent understanding. We also chose D2 (and are looking to support Mermaid soon too).

Would love to hear others' thoughts on whether interactivity for humans is more valuable vs context for agents.

https://github.com/unslop-xyz/noodles

[0]: https://github.com/AlexanderGrooff/mermaid-ascii

Playground here: https://btucker.github.io/selkie/

One of the cool features is it can use kitty to output diagrams direct to the terminal (if kitty is supported like in ghostty).

I'm planning to blog about the whole process soon.

My Markdown editor, KeenWrite[2], integrates Kroki as a service. This means whenever a new text-based diagram format is offered by Kroki, it is available to KeenWrite, dynamically. The tutorial[3] shows how it works. (Aside, variables within diagrams are also possible, shown at the end.)

Note that Mermaid diagrams cannot be rendered by most libraries[4] due to its inclusion of <foreignObject>, which is browser-dependent.

[1]: https://kroki.io/

[2]: https://keenwrite.com/

[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIp8spwykZY

[4]: https://github.com/orgs/mermaid-js/discussions/7085

[0]: https://github.com/AlexanderGrooff/mermaid-ascii

I think I ran into a bug, the "start" edge is not rendered. This is from https://agents.craft.do/mermaid:

    stateDiagram-v2
      [*] --> Idle
      Idle --> Active : start
      Active --> Idle : cancel
      Active --> Done : complete
      Done --> [*]

    ┌──────────┐
    │          │
    │          │
    │          │
    └─────┬────┘
          │     
          │     
          │     
          │     
          ▼     
    ┌──────────┐
    │          │
    │   Idle   │
    │          │
    └─────┬────┘
          ▲     
          │     
      cancel   
          │     
          ▼     
    ┌─────┴────┐
    │          │
    │  Active  │
    │          │
    └─────┬────┘
          │     
          │     
      complete  
          │     
          ▼     
    ┌──────────┐
    │          │
    │   Done   │
    │          │
    └─────┬────┘
          │     
          │     
          │     
          │     
          ▼     
    ┌──────────┐
    │          │
    │          │
    │          │
    └──────────┘

ASCII diagrams are inherently constrained by printable characters, which makes them hard to standardize and limits their expressiveness compared to proper diagram renderers.

A good monospaced font and they can look really sharp!

I will definitely give this tool a shot.

I will also shout out monodraw as a really nice little application for building generic ASCII diagrams- https://monodraw.helftone.com/

Adjacent... I am somewhat curious if a well crafted rust library/app might work better via WASM since it's a relatively simple input/output scenario... I've done similar for input sanitization tasks in the past and it worked better than JS/TS.

  Subgraph Direction Override: Using direction LR inside a subgraph while the outer graph flows TD.

The last time I checked, Mermaid couldn't render subgraphs in a different direction than the overall graph.

I have a list of text to diagram tools here https://xosh.org/text-to-diagram/ but not many are text to ascii. There are a few text to ascii sequence diagram tools.

(Mermaid isn’t accessible by default either, but there’s current work in that direction: https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid/pull/7349)

https://www.craft.do/

While great for individuals, it's particularly strong out-of-the-box for teams, or even teams of teams with two levels of grouping.

They bring the same ... craft (ahem) ... to the whole product as shown in their Craft Agents or this renderer, with a strong foundation originally started in the Markdown philosophy. Check out the founder's story on their About page for a refreshingly LLM-free backgrounder.

[0]: https://github.com/JuliaPlots/UnicodePlots.jl

Im sold. Love mermaid but totally agree.

[0]: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/14375

I wonder if we can get the ASCII render to run inside Vim/NeoVim?

Getting AI to generate valid mermaid diagrams on scale extremely hard. With maid i'm hitting 100% accuracy.

Maid is basically built from scratch mermaid parser, without any dependnecies, which knows how to auto-fix common AI slop diagramming issues.

So for the "All Edge styles"

    graph TD
      A[Source] -->|solid| B[Target 1]
      A -.->|dotted| C[Target 2]
      A ==>|thick| D[Target 3]

    ┌──────────┐                                     
    │          │                                     
    │  Source  ├─thickted─────┐                      
    │          │        │     │                      
    └─────┬────┘        └─────┼────────────────┐     
          │                   │                │     
          │                   │                │     
        solid                 │                │     
          │                   │                │     
          ▼                   ▼                ▼     
    ┌──────────┐        ┌──────────┐     ┌──────────┐
    │          │        │          │     │          │
    │ Target 1 │        │ Target 2 │     │ Target 3 │
    │          │        │          │     │          │
    └──────────┘        └──────────┘     └──────────┘

The Parallel links, example mermaid

    graph TD
      A[Input] & B[Config] --> C[Processor]
      C --> D[Output] & E[Log]

    ┌───────────┐     ┌────────┐
    │           │     │        │
    │   Input   │     │ Config │
    │           │     │        │
    └─────┬─────┘     └────┬───┘
          │                │    
          │                │    
          │                │    
          │                │    
          ▼                │    
    ┌───────────┐          │    
    │           │          │    
    │ Processor ├◄─────────┤    
    │           │          │    
    └─────┬─────┘          │    
          │                │    
          │                │    
          │                │    
          │                │    
          ▼                ▼    
    ┌───────────┐     ┌────────┐
    │           │     │        │
    │   Output  │     │  Log   │
    │           │     │        │
    └───────────┘     └────────┘

https://github.com/1jehuang/mermaid-rs-renderer

Just submitted a HN thread about it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=46807750