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I feel both have their niche carved out.

For developers, text-based editors are an excellent tool to represent not-so-complex logic/procedures where they don't need to spend time worrying about the visual angle. It's easier to integrate into documentation with a ```mermaid, and easy to keep updated.

So there is no context switching involved in opening up a visual editing tool, downloading the image, integrating it to the docs, then having to repeat the whole process again when there are changes.

As an architect, one of your primary responsibilities would be to create high-level diagrams that need to convey a lot more information to the stakeholders, where the weightage of the visual component is high (layout, colors, etc). Which is where Visual editors shine.

Text - Simple, Quick & Dirty diagrams.

Visual - Detailed, well thought out diagrams.




For me it's the exact opposite:

Text - Detailed, well thought out diagrams.

Visual - Simple, Quick & Dirty diagrams.

The reason is mostly that diagrams from visual editors are basically unmaintainable and therefore are only good for throw-away stuff. Also simple diagrams, especially when you are not entirely sure what you want, are quicker done in a visual editor.

If I need to document a complex system and especially when the documentation has to evolve with the system it is generated diagrams from version controlled text files for me hands down.


Very much agree with this. In fact wrote something on this last year almost to the day: https://www.ilograph.com/blog/posts/its-time-to-drop-drag-an...


Thanks. That is exactly my train of thought on this. Nice to see this positioned also from you.


Themes and colors, we can do. I've seen people drawing some spectacular diagrams with Mermaid.

But we cannot easily add layout logic without sacrificing the simplicity of the syntax.




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