This is pretty cool! I'm a visual thinker but also love how lightweight/transportable/open text is. Historically, images have been so hard to edit/update/maintain; plus either they or their tools are proprietary.

If Mermaid.js really gives us what Markdown does (separation of content and presentation), I'm all for it. Gonna explore this more....

Mermaid only supports a few types of diagrams, but it's great for those. For a more general language, pikchr can be useful. It's a variation on the troff era language pic that generates SVG from text. From the SQLite folks.

[0] https://pikchr.org

Thanks for pointing this out to me. Will check it out!

There appears to be a book, recently submitted. (recently published?): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33461764

PlantUML is pretty much the standard tool of this type: https://plantuml.com/

For sequence diagrams sure, but for many other diagrams, mermaid is a easier to get started in. PlantUML gives more control and variety of images, but with that power comes some complexity.

But both are pretty handy.

It's nice but I think D2 is nicer.

I'm waiting for D2 to be open sourced and going that more tools will adopt it then, like mermaid and diagram.