Comment by philfreo

Comment by philfreo 12 hours ago

8 replies

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I spent some time playing around with this recently and loved it at first. I also realized ChatGPT is pretty good at generating Mermaid diagrams (didn't try your own AI features).

However after getting into it some I ran into some significant frustrations. After creating a medium-complexity diagram, I was excited to see the Whiteboard feature to drag things around / improve the layout manually. But it really started breaking, it just wouldn't let me organize/drag things where I wanted, and I couldn't get things to not overlap. I also wished more diagram types supported Whiteboard (I noticed some didn't).

Also I some confusion between the capabilities of mermaidchart.com and mermaid.live. Are these competitors? Variations of similar apps. I was confused. Also "Playground" vs "Live Editor" is confusing.

Overall glad this exists and hope it continues to improve.

AFirestone 11 hours ago

Hi there, Mermaid CEO here:)

I hear you on the whiteboard. It's still in its early days. Should be substantially improved in the coming months.

To clarify on mermaidchart.com and mermaid.live, we are the same team. Mermaid.live is our fully open source hosted editor. This was the original editor for our 10 year old open source project. The creator of Mermaid recently founded mermaidchart.com with the CEO of Gitlab's venture studio to expand the capabilities of Mermaid for more users and build an enterprise grade product. The company is open core and venture backed. The Mermaid project will remain forever open source and will continue to invest in growing it and the company for those that desire more advanced business features.

We really appreciate your feedback and support. Ping me if you'd like to chat with our product team about the features you're hoping for:) andrew@mermaidchart.com

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  • infogulch 10 hours ago

    Please forgive my posting on the broader topic of Mermaid... The Mermaid package has gotten much bigger recently. Compare mermaid.min.js across a sampling of major releases:

         9.2.2  2022-11-09  1.09 MB 
     9.3.0  2022-12-15   899 kB
     9.4.0  2023-02-15  2.82 MB
    10.9.1  2024-05-14  3.34 MB
    11.4.1  2024-11-27  2.57 MB
    All the new features are really cool, and maybe this is "fine" when mermaid itself is the purpose of the website (like this submission), but it's a bigger burden when mermaid is a value-add for generic markdown documentation: every visitor has to download and execute 3+MB of js just to view simple diagrams, or worse even when there are no diagrams on that page at all.

    Is there a plan to reduce the required bundle size for viewers and users that only use a small subset of mermaid's wide feature set?

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  • x0hm 25 minutes ago

    Mermaid CEO is probably the coolest title I've ever heard

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  • zelcon 9 hours ago

    Props for somehow convincing all the foundation models to generate charts using your markup. It is guaranteed to survive a very long time now.

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  • paulg2222 9 hours ago

    Good choice of a product name. Totally applicable. /s I know single-word, unrelated product labelling is the shit for quite some years now.

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LordDragonfang 11 hours ago

> it just wouldn't let me organize/drag things where I wanted, and I couldn't get things to not overlap

I suspect this might be a fundamental issue with mermaid. I've always had issues getting it to lay things out in any other way than how it "wants" me to, with giant gaps between things

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  • dominicdewalt 9 hours ago

    This is definitely a gap in current Mermaid functionality. This is a gap we're aiming to close in 2025. Significant Whiteboard improvements and expanded diagram support is on the way! If you have a specific use case or diagram type you'd like us to keep in mind then let me know! dominic@mermaidchart.com

    Thanks for your comment:)

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