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D2 has been around for a while (and has been posted here before) but still surprisingly unknown. It's so much better than mermaid – giving them a boost with this post!

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I like d2 better than mermaid, but mermaid is natively supported in so many places making it the pragmatic choice.

true, unfortunately not supported in most markdown renderers... generally i've chosen d2 when i want a more intricate/custom diagram

Mermaid is supported in Github Markdown though. That's a pretty large market by itself.

last time i was installing mermaid with npm, noted that installation lasts too long. i checked and found that it is installing headless chrome under the hood...

I didn't know about D2. Mind sharing features that are better than mermaid?

I'm not the OP, but the reason I started using D2 as opposed to Mermaid is that D2 supports animations: https://d2lang.com/tour/composition/

In other words, you can have one D2 file that generates `step1.png,` `step2.png`, and `step3.png`. Useful for PowerPoint presentations!

Thanks, animation is really an impressive feature.

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