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Show HN: Free Mermaid Diagram Editor

moxiedocs.com

51 pointsghosts_14 comments

I've been slowly adding some new free tools to Moxie Docs (partly for SEO, partly to illustrate some of our feature sets before any commitment) for some reason this mermaid editor one blew up on Google rankings so I figured I'd share in case people find it useful! We also have ADR, AGENTS.md, LLMs, and a few other free tools.

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Thanks for dropping this here. I have been frustrated for quite some time. I blindly followed the advice to learn some mermaid. Then I discovered that the ecosystem absolutely sucks.

Question for mermaid users out there. I have not used mermaid more than just superficially looking at it but it looks to me like a re-implementation of graphviz? Which has been around forever. Is there something it does that makes it more appealing?

I am not knocking this Free Mermaid Diagram Editor either. Seems decent. But, similarly, edotor has been around forever.

https://edotor.net/

Mermaid has become the de facto charting language when working with AI, so it has been elevated to the chosen one, like Python.

It also renders on GitHub in markdown files with ```mermaid``` code blocks so it's super useful for adding architecture diagrams and similar to your README

It does more types of charts, including Gantt charts. Very useful.

Thank you. I went and looked at what else it could do and it does have a much larger feature set.

Handy.

I've been (very loosely) trying to get AI to generate diagrams for a while, and even Copilot can't get Visio's file format correct enough to allow Visio to open it successfully.

This is a nice clean interface I can just paste attempts into. Thank you!

I created https://smalldocs.org to help with this. After installing you can tell your agent to "sdoc me a mermaid diagram of X flow" or "sdoc me a visual architecture of this repo" or something, and it handles it nicely (imo!).

Here is the mermaid diagram gallery: https://smalldocs.org/s/PpArByXuNBA5kGS1JVMUW6#k=uTqNRLqzz_T...

Code available: https://github.com/espressoplease/smalldocs

Discord: https://discord.gg/txjATTsDaq

Yeah the main product I'm working on (Moxie Docs) has AI generation of mermaid diagrams, I find that it works __well enough__ but I needed some strong guardrails, quality checks, and templating to make sure it doesn't generate broken diagrams (or useless ones). First few iterations it would create a diagram for everything and it was a bit zealous on when it decided diagrams would be useful.

just get ai to generate mermaid, it's super competent at doing it, you don't really need any other tools.

I’ve found that it can do it, but the aesthetics of the diagrams it generates are awful. I end up going back to manual Omnigraffle.

There is an art to designing the human to human communication aspect of diagrams that transcends which lines connect where.

https://kroki.io/#try

Shout out to Kroki, which offers Mermaid and many other text-based diagramming formats.

The only problem with mermaid that GitHub UI renders it poorly. Large diagrams very difficult to view. Any solution for that?

Probably because the official editor sucks after paywalling features and steering you into signing up.

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