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Comment by fayten | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious what you prefer instead?

I find that tools like Mermaid are pretty invaluable, especially when editing very large processes. Draw.io diagrams tend to get pretty unwieldy as they scale and editing inter process stuff if you forgot something quite frustrating.

Sequence diagrams are possibly my favorite feature in Mermaid: https://jessems.com/posts/2023-07-22-the-unreasonable-effect...

Admittedly I primarily use D2 nowadays. The only features I miss in D2 from mermaid are the GitHub automatic rendering and Sequence diagram numbers. https://play.d2lang.com

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I use excalidraw, even upgraded to pro out of my own pocket. It's not git-compatible in the sense that it's not text (though you can export to SVG and commit that, which I've done). But I love that it has the feel of an approximation or just a quick sketch rather than a formal promise of how a system works.

When I've used dot or mermaid to build diagrams I've always found it hard to specify layout, colours and sizes, which I use to emphasise different views on a system. I'd love some sort of middle ground where I get the benefits of version control but also the sketch-like character of excalidraw

can it automatically re-flow flowchart layouts?

I'm actually not sure, It's no really a flowchart editor, more of a vector drawing program, though it has some features like being able to pin the end of a line to an object so it follows while you drag

Nowadays I use mermaid, but I only use sequence diagrams. They're incredibly useful to convey to a client at a high-level what are the different workflows in a system.

From the post: All diagrams that look like the top image or the mermaid example after the complex one, could just be a list of steps.

For the complex one, maybe yes, it makes sense to have an overview and I think maintaining that vs text is also easier. However from what I've seen, most things can be boiled down to a list of 1, 2, 2.1, etc.

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