alt Hacker NewsI 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.
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I had the exact same set of issues and questions.
> 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
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:) [email protected]