[HN Gopher] Show HN: Diagram as code tool with draggable customi...
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       Show HN: Diagram as code tool with draggable customizations
        
       In the past I've used declarative diagram generation tools like
       Mermaid.js a lot for quickly drawing up things but for
       presentations or deliverables I find that I have to then move the
       generated diagrams over to a tool like Lucidchart which allows full
       control of the organization and customization.  Therefore I am now
       working on this to combine the benefits of both into just one tool
       which can do both functions.  The project is certainly in the early
       stages but if you find yourself making architecture diagrams I'd
       love to hear your thoughts on the idea or even a Github issue for a
       feature request!  One of the workflows I'm targeting is when an AI
       generates the first draft of the diagram (all the LLMs know .mmd
       syntax) and then the user can then customize it to their liking
       which I think can drastically speed up making complex diagrams!
        
       Author : RohanAdwankar
       Score  : 69 points
       Date   : 2025-10-25 20:38 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | vanilla wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | RohanAdwankar wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | anorak27 wrote:
       | Wonderful project.
       | 
       | There's also mermaidjs to excalidraw
       | https://github.com/excalidraw/mermaid-to-excalidraw
        
         | RohanAdwankar wrote:
         | This seems cool! Thanks for sharing.
        
       | huydotnet wrote:
       | Wonderful! I have been wanting something like this for a really
       | long time!
        
         | RohanAdwankar wrote:
         | Thanks!
        
       | gurjeet wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | gurjeet wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | RohanAdwankar wrote:
           | That makes sense I will eventually get to that!
        
         | RohanAdwankar wrote:
         | Thanks for catching that! Just added the license file.
        
       | plmpsu wrote:
       | I really wish PlantUML would just solve this jarring problem.
        
       | dixtel wrote:
       | Very cool idea, this is exactly what I'm missing from mermaid.
       | Thanks for sharing this!
        
       | dboreham wrote:
       | Thank you.
        
       | hamburglar wrote:
       | Just FYI your chosen example causes a little confusion in the
       | context of "code tool" because I immediately thought, "is this
       | thing an attempt at some kind of weird visual programming tool
       | which is giving me the choice of Go, Python, and Rust? WTF?" But
       | then I realized that was just sample data.
        
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       (page generated 2025-10-25 23:00 UTC)