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Comment by tjoff | Hacker News Reader

These submissions/threads have been cropping up a bit lately. But I have yet to seen anyone comment on pikchr, https://pikchr.org/ (NOTE: doesn't have as close of a relation to UML as Plant UML)

After what felt like endless googling it is what I decided to spend some time with, haven't had time to do much yet so can't say how it performs for me but the idea and execution really resonates with me.

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I want a balance between being able to make diagrams pretty and how much work I spend on it. PlantUML has much more thorough example documentation. Even though I bump up against corners in the customization I do want, it’s easier for the role it serves (both documentation but also the source kind of misty gets translated into an acceptable diagram without having to overspecify certain things as I saw in some of the source snippets on that page). This is definitely good if I want to spend a lot making something pretty that I can version control. If that were the case though I’d collaborate with a designer to write that in this tool and make the clarity better (but if they wanted to do a traditional SVG diagram in Illustrator using whatever workflow they want, I wouldn’t care either). If it’s not worth a designer’s time, it’s generally not worth it for me to spend hours on a skill that’s not natural for me. So I like a program that makes it easy to make it pretty enough but that I don’t have to think about too much (eg having it embedded in Wikis at work also helps in the learn 1 useful thing and use it multiple places).

pikchr is awesome. A project I did recently was a WASM-compiled pikchr library to generate diagrams directly in the browser [1]. Here's a very early demo of a live editor you can play around with [2].

Not fully-featured yet but what I'd like to eventually do is set it up in a similar way to the mermaidjs editor [3]. They encode the entire diagram in the url. That makes it really easy to link to from markdown documents and has the nice benefit that the diagram is immutable for a given url so you don't need a backend to store anything.

[1]: https://www.npmjs.com/package/pikchr-js

[2]: https://pikchr-editor.insert-mode.dev/

[3]: https://mermaid-js.github.io/mermaid-live-editor

The examples[0] look really good! Thanks for mentioning this.

[0] https://pikchr.org/home/doc/trunk/doc/examples.md

Here you can play with it: https://pikchr.org/home/pikchrshow

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