Very interesting. It might be very powerful to somehow integrate with emacs/vim so that their wordsmith capability can facilitate the little discipline in text editing.
Agree. To be honest, I'd find it useful if it were closed source but native installable tool that can convert text to diagram which then could be exported to image/pdf etc.
Yeah, diagramming with ASCII in a text editor is actually quite virtuous!
I wonder if it would be useful to publish a series of screen-capture videos demonstrating how to build these kind of diagrams. It's really not difficult!
Hi I'm Hugo, we are a team of 2 and recently released a desktop version of the text-to-diagram generation tool. The web editor will always be free (https://diagram.codes). The desktop version has support for color themes, local files and is part of our plan to make development sustainable.
Feedback from the HN community has been very helpful to improve the beta release.
Ouch. I use Word as well, now that I'm an Architect. Thank you very much.
Actually, a lot of my initial work is still done in vi, and I'm always on the lookout for good software that will let me describe my diagrams in vi and automatically generate the graphics. Does anyone know a good addon to graphviz for creating flowcharts and sequence diagrams?
Haven't read the whole article yet, but the state of latex editing in emacs diagram caught my attention. Anyone has a clue what software was used to create it? Found the color schemes and hyperlinks pretty neat.
This is a great idea. I would for more plain text editors to natively support common text to diagram solutions like PlantUML etc. PlantUML notation is somewhat readable even without rendering it.
Have you had this for a long time, or are you speculating that it’s the type of software you like?
This looks very cool to me, though. If you have used it, can you share how you’ve used the generated diagrams? I can imagine a screenshot of the diagram, but the raw text would probably be too big in (e.g. a terminal).
This is pretty cool! I would love to see this kind of tool (including the LaTeX output) available for other kinds of diagrams. Sequence diagrams, box-and-line diagrams, etc.
If you come up with a tool that will pick up on a diagram in a readable ascii format in the middle of a document, let me edit it, and then patch in the updated diagram without making any kind of changes to other portions of the file, then we'd be getting somewhere.
Even then there'd be issues, as e.g. I might want to modify descriptions elsewhere in the file in between modifying the diagram. As a concrete example, I am doing that these days with a spec for a system I'm planning. I'm using a custom Markdown based processor with a filter that takes Graphviz/dot syntax inline, and while I edit the diagram, I'll also then often want to write something about what I've added to it. So if I was going to use an external program, the roundtrip from text editor -> diagram editor -> text editor would need to be very fast and smooth.
Though to be really useful for me, it'd need to work for me via an ssh connection as well...
It's really hard to beat plain text for some of these use-cases. At least without first getting more graphics capabilities back into our terminals.
I found a plugin a while back called "AI Diagrams" that generates whimsical.com diagrams for me. Combined with the "speech to text" systems in chatgpt means I can just start babbling about some topic and let it write it all down, collect it into documentation, and even spit out a few diagrams from it.
I generally have to spend like 10 minutes cleaning them up and rearranging them to look a bit more sane, but it's been a godsend!
Similarly I sometimes paste a bunch of code in and tell it to write some starter docs for this code, then I can go from there and clean it up manually, or just tell it what changes need to be made. (technically I tend to use editor plugins these days not copy+paste, but the idea is the same)
Other times I'll paste in docs and have it reformat them into something better. Like I recently took our ~3 year old README in a monorepo that goes over all the build and lint commands and had it rearrange everything into sets of markdown tables which displayed the data in a much easier to understand format.
ASCII export, so I can put nice diagrams in comments and docstrings. Also possibly (assuming those nice diagrams are unambiguous) a parsing bridge which lets me convert them into data.
How do I export the diagram generated?
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