Hacker News Reader

Comment by smusamashah | Hacker News Reader

I maintain a list of browser based text to diagram tools (which I have shared a number of times here). I recently realised that the online version of D2 does NOT work solely in browser, diagram's are generated by backend servers.

Can D2 work in browser by itself? Does the extension mentioned in the post work offline? (lots of tools do)

View on HN

It does now! (As of a week ago)

Check out the network tab in the d2 playground. It's powered by d2.js, a wrapper around a wasm port of d2, which we've recently been working on. Not super officially ready yet but soon to be, and will be a separate announcement.

This is awesome news! Thank you for the excellent tool. Getting it hosted places has been my biggest pain point.

Clearly things have changed a bit recently but since a long time I use D2 exclusively locally. The binary has a watch mode that starts a web server and pushes changes on save so you can interactively develop your diagrams and e.g. share the web browser over a video conference or such.

I don't know about that Mermaid thing others are talking about in the thread so I can't compare but D2 is very easy to learn the basics of and get started with. Like a few minutes from install to your first diagram kind of easy.

Yes, but why have all that effort in spinning a web server when I can just give a link to a place where I have embedded the chart? Or even embed it in whatever chat you have that presentation on? Don't need the binary anywhere, that's the strength of Mermaid

Until that D2 wasm port is officially released, I don't think it's even fair to call D2 competition to Mermaid, it's on a complete other level of useability. I'm glad to see that it's close to releasing.

Like I said, I know nothing of this Mermaid and did not make such a comparison, and I'm fine with it since all I want to produce is a SVG that I can then embed wherever and D2 is more than adequate for this purpose.

~~May I see that list, please?~~

Edit: found it! Thanks.

https://xosh.org/text-to-diagram/

Thanks for sharing. Looking at the first section- official mermaid playground supports both ui and text editing. It's been a life changer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com