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Comment by cogogo | Hacker News Reader

Little weird to see this on the lead page… mermaid has been around for a long time. And in general I’ve found its real world use pretty lacking.

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I use it and see it many times per month as it’s the preferred way of sticking graphics and diagrams in markdown in git repos and generated static sites.

It’s so handy for putting a sequence diagram in your docs and then tracking the changes over time using git.

I’m curious what other software developers use if not this. I’ve tried specific graph and drawing tools like lucid and Visio, but the simplicity of mermaid is nice. And I don’t know anything else that shows git blame for who changed what in my diagram, when.

> And I don’t know anything else that shows git blame for who changed what in my diagram, when.

You could do this with any diagrams-as-code tool, no?

Mermaid is sort of a defacto standard because github auto renders it inside markdown files.

I think he's saying you can click and edit on the diagram, which mermaid doesn't support. This does propagate back into the source.

I think you are talking about "just change the text and regenerate", which achieves much the same goal.

I'm not sure in what cases the former is better.

Such as?

Re what other developers use. I tried mermaid and other text to diagram tools for work, but, as mentioned above, found them lacking. Most companies / teams I know of use something like excalidraw or miro. Definitely matches your simplicity requirements, but, obviously, no git blame

I haven’t tried excalidraw, but don’t like miro as I want my docs embedded with the repo, not linking out to a third party.

I like miro for brainstorming and such.

I love it when this happens, people almost always reply with something cool they did with it, or discovered. The link isn't new, often the comments are.

Its real-world use is drawing diagrams on a web page! I much prefer diagram-as-code to diagram-as-screenshot. e.g. https://sbs.johnnydecimal.com/14.23+OPS1#diagram

We use it a lot for internal documentation, eg in Markdown on GitHub (renders natively), Notion, and Jira.

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