D2 is a modern diagram scripting language that turns text to diagrams

afruitpie@lemmy.world to Programming@programming.dev – 86 points –
Home | D2 Documentation
d2lang.com
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how does this compare to mermaid or plantuml?

I’ve been using D2 for my diagrams for about a month now. The D2 syntax is the most natural to me, but finding online help for Mermaid and PlantUML is easier.

Mermaid is inuded by default in some markdown flavours, you can use it on github, mkdocs websites and probably others.

This feels like a more modern and feature rich version of PlantUML. Very interesting

Can D2 do flowchart aka activity diagram in PlantUML?

Looks like it. https://d2lang.com/tour/sequence-diagrams

I'm impressed with the grid diagrams too. I'm not sure plantUML has anything equivalent.

It doesnt support all the diagram types plantUML does (for now) but it has the only two i ever used anyway. The tooling seems more robust and modern. I think I have a better chance getting my coworkers to try this one

Oops i can't read.

Flowcharts / activity diagrams seem well supported too, though.

Does it? I looked through the document and didn't find it. It seems to be more focus on state diagram / component diagram.

Might just be my ignorance- if it has boxes connected with directional arrows it does everything I need a flow chart to do

There are a lot more specific shapes and layouts in a flowchart than simple boxes and arrows. E.g. start and end, branching, loop back, subprocess, etc

For VS Code users, there's also the terrastruct.d2 extension that provides language support for .d2 files. It even let's you use the preview feature to watch live changes!

If anyone is interested, it would be great to have a write up on d2 and the extension over at !vscode@programming.dev

This looks crazy cool… one of those projects that I really wish I had a use for so I could try it lol

I would love to use it to create AWS architecture diagrams.

Doesn't look too bad, I doubt it will dislodge graphviz/dot any time soon, though :)

Looks great. I've been using asciiflow and sequence diagram for my diagrams. I'll give this a try

I would love to have this in Azure DevOps for wikis. The Mermaid support is too limiting.