D2 (text to diagram tool) now supports ASCII renders

I thought your playground wasn't working as it renders black text on black background. Maybe I have darkmode enabled or something. Other renderers work, but ascii is invisible.

So from TFA it just downscales from ELK? Do I have to specify ELK for this to work, or will it automagically enable if I try to output a .txt? (Really I'm just curious becasue I use ELK already for most of my d2 diagrams).

Just wanted to thank you for a great tool :-). I love d2 and ever since I discovered it a couple of years back I've been using it for all my diagramming needs.

Thanks again and keep up the good work!

Thanks! Good to know, we'll slot this for 0.7.2 (next release)

It does now! (As of a week ago)

Check out the network tab in the d2 playground. It's powered by d2.js, a wrapper around a wasm port of d2, which we've recently been working on. Not super officially ready yet but soon to be, and will be a separate announcement.

Clearly things have changed a bit recently but since a long time I use D2 exclusively locally. The binary has a watch mode that starts a web server and pushes changes on save so you can interactively develop your diagrams and e.g. share the web browser over a video conference or such.

I don't know about that Mermaid thing others are talking about in the thread so I can't compare but D2 is very easy to learn the basics of and get started with. Like a few minutes from install to your first diagram kind of easy.

~~May I see that list, please?~~

Edit: found it! Thanks.

1. It depends on what you value =). For some, those 2 you mentioned are enough. For others, it can be something like the our CLI doesn't require a chromium browser to render SVGs (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31275754). It doesn't cover every difference, but we made a little comparison site if it helps: https://text-to-diagram.com

2. I'm not trying to advertise our paid product in this post about the open source product, but since you mentioned it, we make an IDE that adds the ability to lock in positions and dimensions: https://docs.terrastruct.com/tour/freehand

> how does this add value over mermaid?

As a longtime Mermaid user that just started trying out D2 recently:

* D2's syntax is much less cumbersome to write and, from the features provided, I would expect maintain because of better abstractions.

* While D2 supports fewer canned diagram types out-of-the-box (a big advantage for Mermaid), D2 has better composition support (via layers and scenarios, particularly) than Mermaid, which is a killer feature for lots of use cases. If I need a Sankey diagram, obviously, Mermaid wins; if I want to do a leveled DFD, while I could in theory use either, D2 is much better.

* D2 has more freedom for mixing elements, because instead of being oriented around diagram types, it uses some special shapes within what amounts to a single universal diagram type ("sequence diagrams" work a bit like a diagram type, but the diagram itself is a shape that can be used like other shapes, and tables [as used in ERDs] and classes [as used in UML class diagrams] are also just shapes, not a construct available in particular diagram types.)

> in my opinion, what all these tools are missing is the ability to add a manual „corrective“ layer, meaning to be able to adjust the automatically created output by moving and resizing boxes by a certain x/y amount.

Technically, I think you can do that in Mermaid (by attaching CSS classes to the nodes that do the actual nudging) if you really want to.

> 2. in my opinion, what all these tools are missing is the ability to add a manual „corrective“ layer, meaning to be able to adjust the automatically created output by moving and resizing boxes by a certain x/y amount.

Something like Struturizr? https://structurizr.com/

It's a diagramming tool

> I like how it looks and works

Those are "real reasons".

I like that it seems to support inline latex formulas, which seems like a great feature

Further update -- I see an emacs plugin. :-)

I am happy. Something to play with tonight.

D2 already supports a live-updating HTTP server serving a live-updating .svg, so if you tile a browser with vim, you can already get live-updates.

I discovered D2 about a year ago, and I use it for all of my diagrams now.

I typically use Moondraw for ASCII diagrams but this is pretty great for when you're already in Vim.

Yeah, but weird/unfortunate that it's written in vimscript.

Unfortunately not, I've tried reaching out to GH folks but no dice. However it should be noted that d2.js, which enables client-side renders, didn't really become usable until this month and still isn't really officially released (kind of hidden). So, we'll see if the official release (soon™) changes things. If any D2-enjoyers reading this knows anyone on the GH frontend team, plz bend their ear =)

No, sadly. That's still the biggest obstacle for a lot of my documentation. I push mermaid perhaps a little farther than it wants to go just so I don't have to spend the time setting up a CI pipe to compile the D2 into a PNG which is embedded in the documentation.

I use LLM to tell my children bedtime stories and to wish my wife goodnight. Saves me a lot of time and energy

> Llm to text to diagram is the killer workflow these days.

It's useful, but I think only marginally. When using a diagrams-as-code tool, having an LLM write it for you gets you up and running faster, but long term you have more control (and no hallucinations) just writing the code yourself. It'll probably be fewer keystrokes in the end. Doubly so if your diagrams-as-code tool has decent autocomplete.

I will admit, I thought this was originally about D lang - I am still glad I clicked as I also have an interest in text-based diagrams.

I dont really using Dlang now - but still interested in the language. This click was a win-win either way!

Yes, but the only one I found on the playground is all newlines and spaces.

In escaped form:

    \x20\n\x20\n\x20\n\n