Just last Friday, some coworker showed me her mermaid diagrams about workflows at work. I am still not comfortable with needing to login to some website to convert some format into a useful format. If I cannot run it locally on my computer it doesn't exist for me. So I tried to install their official looking cli client.
The protocol from my memory roughly looks like this I npm install something, then it tells me I have to npx (wth is that? I think that is new) install something, which gives me some weird puppeteer permissions issue. If it is permissions I guess I have to be root for the install, I try a bit more and get nowhere the same issues keep happening. Look on their website, see they have a docker as an alternative, this is a pretty newly installed computer so I have to install docker, but which one? There is 3 options and I am not sure. I try to run their docker and mess up because I do not read the documentation correctly and I have to map the directory with my .mdd file with <my-dir>:/data and this was unintuitive to me so I ignored the first part and replaced /data with my path. Again obviously a mistake on my side, but it happens every time and adds to my confusion. I look into the docs again and find my mistake. I finally get a resulting svg from the docker command. Excitement! I open the svg and it lacks all the text and I think there were also errors in the shape. Then I remember obsidian has a mermaid plugin so I thought about trying that, but the obsidian install also fails with some random error about not being able to connect to chrome.
On the other hand whenever I get a cmake project I clone it. I create a folder for the build, cd into it, run cmake <path-to-source-folder> without even looking at the documentation and it either works or I get a pretty clear message what is missing on my OS and with a short web search I can just apt install it and try again (yes this sometimes has multiple rounds) and it works!