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These submissions/threads have been cropping up a bit lately. But I have yet to seen anyone comment on pikchr, https://pikchr.org/ https://pikchr.org/ (NOTE: d

by tjoff 6y ago

These submissions/threads have been cropping up a bit lately. But I have yet to seen anyone comment on pikchr, https://pikchr.org/ https://pikchr.org/ (NOTE: doesn't have as close of a relation to UML as Plant UML) After what felt like endless googling it is what I decided to spend some time with, haven't had time to do much yet so can't say how it performs for me but the idea and execution really resonates with me.

hwj 6y ago
Here you can play with it: https://pikchr.org/home/pikchrshow https://pikchr.org/home/pikchrshow
eddyg 6y ago
The examples[0] look really good! Thanks for mentioning this. [0] https://pikchr.org/home/doc/trunk/doc/examples.md https://pikchr.org/home/doc/trunk/doc/examples.md
vlovich123 6y ago
I want a balance between being able to make diagrams pretty and how much work I spend on it. PlantUML has much more thorough example documentation. Even though I bump up against corners in the customization I do want, it’s easier for the role it serves (both documentation but also the source kind of misty gets translated into an acceptable diagram without having to overspecify certain things as I saw in some of the source snippets on that page). This is definitely good if I want to spend a lot making something pretty that I can version control. If that were the case though I’d collaborate with a designer to write that in this tool and make the clarity better (but if they wanted to do a traditional SVG diagram in Illustrator using whatever workflow they want, I wouldn’t care either). If it’s not worth a designer’s time, it’s generally not worth it for me to spend hours on a skill that’s not natural for me. So I like a program that makes it easy to make it pretty enough but that I don’t have to think about too much (eg having it embedded in Wikis at work also helps in the learn 1 useful thing and use it multiple places).
abetlen 6y ago
pikchr is awesome. A project I did recently was a WASM-compiled pikchr library to generate diagrams directly in the browser [1]. Here's a very early demo of a live editor you can play around with [2]. Not fully-featured yet but what I'd like to eventually do is set it up in a similar way to the mermaidjs editor [3]. They encode the entire diagram in the url. That makes it really easy to link to from markdown documents and has the nice benefit that the diagram is immutable for a given url so you don't need a backend to store anything. [1]: https://www.npmjs.com/package/pikchr-js https://www.npmjs.com/package/pikchr-js [2]: https://pikchr-editor.insert-mode.dev/ https://pikchr-editor.insert-mode.dev/ [3]: https://mermaid-js.github.io/mermaid-live-editor https://mermaid-js.github.io/mermaid-live-editor

by tjoff 6y ago

hwj 6y ago

Here you can play with it: https://pikchr.org/home/pikchrshow https://pikchr.org/home/pikchrshow

eddyg 6y ago

The examples[0] look really good! Thanks for mentioning this. [0] https://pikchr.org/home/doc/trunk/doc/examples.md https://pikchr.org/home/doc/trunk/doc/examples.md

vlovich123 6y ago

I want a balance between being able to make diagrams pretty and how much work I spend on it. PlantUML has much more thorough example documentation. Even though I bump up against corners in the customization I do want, it’s easier for the role it serves (both documentation but also the source kind of misty gets translated into an acceptable diagram without having to overspecify certain things as I saw in some of the source snippets on that page). This is definitely good if I want to spend a lot making something pretty that I can version control. If that were the case though I’d collaborate with a designer to write that in this tool and make the clarity better (but if they wanted to do a traditional SVG diagram in Illustrator using whatever workflow they want, I wouldn’t care either). If it’s not worth a designer’s time, it’s generally not worth it for me to spend hours on a skill that’s not natural for me. So I like a program that makes it easy to make it pretty enough but that I don’t have to think about too much (eg having it embedded in Wikis at work also helps in the learn 1 useful thing and use it multiple places).

abetlen 6y ago

pikchr is awesome. A project I did recently was a WASM-compiled pikchr library to generate diagrams directly in the browser [1]. Here's a very early demo of a live editor you can play around with [2]. Not fully-featured yet but what I'd like to eventually do is set it up in a similar way to the mermaidjs editor [3]. They encode the entire diagram in the url. That makes it really easy to link to from markdown documents and has the nice benefit that the diagram is immutable for a given url so you don't need a backend to store anything. [1]: https://www.npmjs.com/package/pikchr-js https://www.npmjs.com/package/pikchr-js [2]: https://pikchr-editor.insert-mode.dev/ https://pikchr-editor.insert-mode.dev/ [3]: https://mermaid-js.github.io/mermaid-live-editor https://mermaid-js.github.io/mermaid-live-editor