I love ASCII diagrams! The fact that I can write a diagram that looks equally wonderful in my terminal via cat as it does rendered on my website is incredible.

A good monospaced font and they can look really sharp!

I will definitely give this tool a shot.

I will also shout out monodraw as a really nice little application for building generic ASCII diagrams- https://monodraw.helftone.com/

> Aesthetics — Might be personal preference, but wished they looked more professional

Im sold. Love mermaid but totally agree.

The live demo requires some download of an AI agent platform? I'd really like to try this but not if that's what's required.

Pair this with Unicode plots[0] and you're set!

[0]: https://github.com/JuliaPlots/UnicodePlots.jl

How is the LaTeX compatibility? Base mermaid's LaTeX compatibility is quite sparse.

See also graph-easy.online (https://github.com/cjlm/graph-easy-online)

Wow! It has this:

  Subgraph Direction Override: Using direction LR inside a subgraph while the outer graph flows TD.

With this, you should be able to approximate swim lane diagrams, which is something Mermaid lacks.

The last time I checked, Mermaid couldn't render subgraphs in a different direction than the overall graph.

The actual Mermaid ASCII renderer is from another project [0]. This project transliterated it to typescript and added their own theming.

[0]: https://github.com/AlexanderGrooff/mermaid-ascii

I've had issues with other CLI wrappers there. ASCII output is a nice touch for including diagrams directly in code comments without breaking formatting. Does it handle large graphs well, or does the text wrap get messy? We tried using `graph-easy` for this before but the syntax was annoying. 6.