It comes back. It acts like it executed shortiness+=1 every day, and "show fewer shorts" does shortiness-=10 or thereabouts. The shorts position on the home screen is based on this hidden shortiness variable. It always bubbles back to the top unless you keep pressing "show fewer shorts" whenever you see it.
We are doing some fundamental changes to how diagrams are rendered, which would enable us to support more renderers. This will enable us to do server side rendering without a browser.
The main reason why we need a browser currently is size calculations of the SVG boxes, which libraries like jsdom does not support.
Please don't take the, in my opinion, excessive criticism to heart. Mermaid is fantastic. It would be even better if it supported more renderers but as it stands to day its an invaluable tool.
That I can bring GraphViz into a browser but not Mermaid out of the browser forces GraphViz for some usecases. Unless browser-native was the intent (idk, it could be... maybe thats why it was named Mermaid), I do think it should be a high priority thing.
FWIW I gave up trying to render SVG for our project and switched to using fabric.js (and node-canvas for server side rendering). For us it was mostly because it had far better text support.
My wife is going to pursue her PhD in US in the coming months, and I'm working as part-time remote employee of a US startup, while owning a startup in India.
What options do I have, which would allow me to visit her for 1-2 months, without affecting my work?
I've heard B1/B2 holders being questioned during entry after they stayed for a month during previous trips.
As I'm not working full time for the US company, I'm not eligible for L1.
A B-1/B-2 visa would not allow you to work for the U.S. company while here or your Indian startup while here. It might seem like overkill but possibly get an O-1 through the U.S. company. There's no minimum amount of time that you must spend in the U.S.
Huh, never knew mermaidchart existed. Love mermaidjs though.
Any plans to ever add styling/placement options? I know that’s not the idea behind it, but optionally, perhaps?
Styling is already present in most charts, and we do have plans to support different layout algorithms which could enable support for custom placement of nodes as well.
IRC is very low bandwidth & offers the minimal requirements for communication which can be accessible/acceptable for many projects. If something heavier is needed or wanted, XMPP MUCs & Matrix Spaces may be a good option since they are federated & decentralized (although Matrix has unfortunate defacto centralization around Matrix.org, because it requires quite a lot of resources to self-host in both the Python server as well as mirroring all content for all users for its take on federation). Mattermost & Zulip are fine, but require an account (I believe) to the central server but are FOSS & used enough places to be considered stable/trustworthy.
All options can by bridged to all other options (even the proprietary ones) in some manner, but if possible, the defacto server would be FOSS & owned/operated by the community so that that community can define their ToS and/or CoC. This way they are in control of the community rather than requiring users agree to someone else’s—especially a for-profit US corporation’s—terms in order to participate. Some users will want privacy, anonymity, control of personal data, or to get around a firewall/sanctions …and these desires should be considered acceptable. If not self-hosted (requires time/money), it’s still better to choose something using open protocols, like a space on Matrix.org, a big chatroom on XMPP’s Blabber/Conversations, Libera.Chat/OFTC, etc.
I'd second the recommendation for Zulip. It's pretty similar to Slack/Discord, but unlike those it has good support for making the archives public. It also has much better threading support, which is a nice bonus.
It’s expensive to self-host, and centralized if using Matrix.org. It has its uses, but XMPP MUCs have a lot of overlapping features & Prosody/ejabbard can run on a potato by comparison.
It might be expensive for an organization to host, but for individual / small groups it can be as low as $6/mo. I've been running a small Matrix server on a DigitalOcean droplet for years now, and the $6/mo plan has been working fine for 5 users, and three bridges running on that server.
I believe all messages/multimedia from all users & the history all the rooms & private messages need to be mirrored which can end up being a lot even with a few users depending on what they’ve joined. If my understand is wrong tho, I’d like to know so I’m not running around with this notion.
This is wonderful. I've always felt docs are a weak point of Mermaid as there are many features that are undocumented, and it's a little incoherent overall. Will add a link to this cheat sheet from the official docs.
Also, we just released v10 which
- is 70% smaller (<100 kB gzipped)
- has lazy loaded diagrams (only download diagrams that are used in the site)
I love Mermaid. But my biggest pain point is having to manually wrap text to keep the shapes compact. It's glaringly obvious just looking at this cheatsheet.
Incorporating an algorithm that figures out the optimal auto-wrapping for each shape to make them compact or, alternatively, one that tries to make all the shapes about the same size, should go hand-in-hand with the automatic layout Mermaid already has.
Thank you very much for your work! I learned about mermaid about a year ago, and have used it pretty extensively since, including as a visualization and control interface for a DAG execution framework.
Mermaid’s flow chart layout engine is quite nice, too. I’ve yet to encounter the kind of messes that graphviz comes up with regularly, even with complicated flow charts.
Out of interest, is there an EBNF form for mermaid? I'm asking as I'm looking at notation alternatives for comments in code, for a language I'm designing.
I'd like to be able to write orgdown+mermaid+mathjax equivalent into comments in the language. The language itself needs to be quite formally specified hence the question.
I know markdown isn't actually suitable for this purpose as there are too many edge-case anomalies, I'm hoping mermaid is better specced around the edges.
A single grammar to support all the different use cases would be challenging. But we did have some plans to introduce guidelines to make different diagram syntaxes more consistent.
I've had this need to render just part of a mermaid graph, and I thought of creating a parser to do it. Basically I'd like to render just the part of the graph that flows through a particular node.
Before I go off and write my own parser using this grammar, would it be practical to do this in mermaid's parser already?
I just posted parallel to your post. What is your positioning of mermaid (and friends like plantuml) vs. visually crafted diagrams?
Textual editing, auto-layouting, little work, obviously, but where is the niche compared to visual editors. As an architect, I have challenges using mermaid when communicating to stakeholders.
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.
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.
I think the sweet spot of text based diagram generators is when the intent is high levels of information delivery at low levels of effort. It is super easy for me to say "a sequence diagram would help convey this concept better" and write up a diagram. Whereas if I had to use a visual tool, it'd be a higher level of effort.
Text based diagrams are also easy to:
* version control
* get feedback on (it's a PR away)
* change
Even though you can style the text based diagrams (see this for plantuml styling: https://plantuml.com/style-evolution ) for a cohesive look and feel, visual based editors are still going to win out. I use them for free form diagrams and also presentations.
For the styling we can't really compete with the visual tools. In Mermaid we have lots of things we can do in that area to make it better though. Both improving the default styling and handling some common use-cases. We could for instance simplify the highlighting of one specific node in a flowchart/class diagram. You can do it right now ofc but you have to make the style/class yourself.
One should be also be aware though that there is a time trap using styling in the visual tools. I spent lots of time making fiddling with styling of boxes in Visio. :)
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Creator of Mermaid and founder of Mermaid Chart
Disclosure: I'm a maintainer for the project and the feature will be a bit tricky, but should be doable.
One issue is that unlike drawio, mermaid doesn't support custom placement of nodes. We could have different style arrow popups, which could render corresponding connections in default locations.
I also feel that this would be a very nice feature to have.
If anyone is interested in implementing, please let us know, and we can discuss ideas.
