Learning a little bit of mermaid is perhaps the highest ROI learning activity I've done in years. Easier, quicker communication about technical ideas - for me it's been a game changer that has made it much easier to get buy in on ideas.
I was painfully reliving my Photoshop days in Miro, trying to create a sequence diagram, when I stumbled upon PlantUML and Mermaid. It was like a breath of fresh air, made things so much easier. Just kicking myself that I didn't know about them earlier.
Mermaid removes most of personal touches and/or design choices. Which makes all diagrams a lot more uniform (which is most of the time a good thing in my book).
Agreed, the desire to make an aesthetically pleasing chart is a huge source of wasted time using WYSIWYG tools. Mermaid is plenty good while unburdening you to simply think about the idea.
- no diffs
- no line attributions
- no easy versioning
- no discussions about whether something should be pushed 10 px to the right
- no reshuffling a whole diagram after you've changed something
- no need to use a shitty office 365 web app (sluggish, slow to load, trusting 10 CDNs)
- ppt is not a graph tool, have fun moving things around after creating a diagram
- no need to rely on proprietary software
- no need to log in anywhere
- no costs
I know there is also the offline old school office suite, but that is more and more deprecated, as MS pushes for everything being a web app.
> Agree with others that Mermaid and PlantUML are very useful, but sometimes you need high degrees of visual customization that they don’t give.
I agree with that and it is the reason I have not yet adopted using Mermaid more.
Would be nice to have Mermaid output some form of standard XML describing the graph and then being able to edit it with a graph editing tool.
I often use yEd for making diagrams, but it is not free/libre software. Still the most capable graph editor I know. It stores graphs as XML "graphml", which is structured data of course. Now if we could have a standard format for graphs and visual attributes of graphs like graphml (maybe even graphml, if it is an open standard?) to export to, when using Mermaid, that would be awesome.
Very good points and clear benefits. My worries are however, the exact layouting demands when you talk to stakeholders. So maybe not a 10px topic but a layering story, LTR-user-to-database thinking, ...
You can auto-generate mermaid diagrams from data/class relationships/loosely coupled messages etc. and make them interactive:
https://www.npmjs.com/package/vue-mermaid
If you try to create a non trivial sequence diagram with a slide deck editor you will become aggravated in a couple of minutes. Now repeat the same thing for a couple scenario diagrams more trying to connect arrows here and there and I guarantee you will throw your computer to a wall.
