[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 : 241 points
Date : 2025-10-25 20:38 UTC (1 days 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.
| vanilla wrote:
| 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
| RohanAdwankar wrote:
| Thanks for sharing I'll look into this. The animations do
| look great!
| 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.
| RohanAdwankar wrote:
| that would be pretty funny. A visual programming tool for
| polyglot microservice architectures XD
| jtwaleson wrote:
| I've seen worse ideas ;)
| eagleinparadise wrote:
| 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.
| RohanAdwankar wrote:
| Great to hear! Absolutely this is the goal.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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).
| monkeycantype wrote:
| Hello Rohan. This is really great. If you are able to include
| parameters to expose the intermediate data as inputs and outputs,
| so that this can be run to a step in the process and output the
| data, or run from a step with pre-prepared data. It would mean
| that other people could build on what you've done to create other
| diagrams and renderings.
| RohanAdwankar wrote:
| Hi thanks! I'm not sure I fully understand what you mean by
| intermediate data? Would this be the location data computed for
| the different components?
| halostatue wrote:
| 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...
| RohanAdwankar wrote:
| Thankyou!
| chrisweekly wrote:
| > npm10 is sufficient (which currently installs node22 on
| MacPorts)
|
| Wait, no, node22 comes with npm10, not the other way around.
| metmac wrote:
| I really wish Mermaid would just ratify a layout spec. Make it
| optional. Use it. Great. Don't use it. The layout engine does its
| thing.
| benblu wrote:
| Thank you! Very cool.
|
| I don't see a button for it (on mobile currently, and will check
| thoroughly at my computer) -- is there a button to add a node?
|
| Another feature I've always craved for code diagramming is
| "collapse downstream nodes" -- though it might be outside of your
| scope (and mermaids?).
| RohanAdwankar wrote:
| Hi as of now I haven't added that feature so the current way
| would be to edit the .mmd text. However I think you are right
| that would be a good feature to add. For collapsing downstream
| nodes I think it would make sense with the request the someone
| else made in this thread for animations. From what I see it
| should certainly be possible to implement at some point!
| liqilin1567 wrote:
| 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.
| RohanAdwankar wrote:
| Thank you! Happy to hear that!
| newusertoday wrote:
| i generally use plantuml in emacs for generating diagrams from
| text but it does not allows for drag and drop editing. This looks
| cool.
| lmeyerov wrote:
| Is this embeddable, eg, a react component that can be hooked
| into?
|
| The lack of this has been a sticking point making us lean to
| dropping mermaid, so very cool to see!
| RohanAdwankar wrote:
| Oh thanks, that's a good idea I'll make a issue on the github
| for that and get to it eventually!
| dackdel wrote:
| isint tldraw an alternative to this
| RohanAdwankar wrote:
| I can look into this further but at a glance I don't see
| something for declarative diagramming syntax. I will say the
| name is fantastic! One of the great things about making this
| thread for me was learning about all the different tools people
| are using!
| parentheses wrote:
| This looks really cool! Next diagram is getting this treatment!
| RohanAdwankar wrote:
| Thanks, let me know how it goes! There's certainly lots of
| improvements to be made to the layout engine and polishing for
| the UI so happy to incorporate any feedback!
| misiek08 wrote:
| It's like dot on steroids? Variables and cleaner syntax, but
| similar premises?
|
| https://graphviz.org/doc/info/lang.html
| sandGorgon wrote:
| so mermaidjs has the concept of layout engines -
| https://www.npmjs.com/package/@mermaid-js/layout-elk
|
| have you considered implementing your algorithm as a (better)
| auto-layout engine for mermaidjs ?
| rapnie wrote:
| 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/
| malnourish wrote:
| D2 is better, but it's not supported by GitHub. Go where your
| users are.
| SOLAR_FIELDS wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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)
| 12tilak34 wrote:
| Looking forward to the project for more development !! I have a
| rust based application where I could integrate this we can
| collaborate at some point I guess :)
| RohanAdwankar wrote:
| Oh sure collaborating sounds fun, what application are you
| building?
| 3abiton wrote:
| Looks pretty neat, what's the advantage over LLM to mermaid?
| RohanAdwankar wrote:
| The main advantage of this project is it enables customizations
| of the layout and visual preferences. So using LLMs to write
| the mermaid code itself still works perfectly fine the mermaid
| code can then directly be passed in as input and then edited
| with this tool.
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