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I love that Mermaid is portable, but I hate its syntax. I wish I could just define the things graphically, dragging nodes around an auto layout canvas, and then

I love that Mermaid is portable, but I hate its syntax. I wish I could just define the things graphically, dragging nodes around an auto layout canvas, and then have it generate the corresponding code that I could then further edit. In other words, the graphical output wouldn't just be a preview of the code, but an editable canvas like Figma or SVG editors. Mermaid is so terrible to work with I usually have to use ChatGPT to make all but the simplest diagrams. It is not very good at it though and will frequently hallucinate invalid syntax, especially for less common charts like sankeys.

zero_shift 1y ago
I agree that Mermaid is kind of a bad language. I get the impression it was the creator's first real DSL project and this has lead to the jumbled syntax. I've found D2 better. There's more control over the layout, the syntax makes more sense. But the web editor is limited. Maybe what I should do is prototype some kind of bidirectional editing for Mermaid. So that you could add / remove / combine / group / reorient the graph items through a GUI. I have some ideas for how to do this