129 pointsby pastelskyApr 9, 2026

9 Comments

pastelskyApr 9, 2026
- Write Mermaid diagrams with a live preview. - Arrange multiple diagrams on an infinite canvas. - Group diagrams into multi-page projects. - Better themes
FlaviusApr 15, 2026
Make no mistakes.
rdosApr 15, 2026
I can't seem to change the colors of the pie chart, other than the predefined themes. But all of those are horrible for a pie chart.
jsmith45Apr 15, 2026
Yeah, as far as I know, you need to define a customized theme to customize pie chart colors. You can prepend the chart with initialization logic like:

%%{init: {"theme": "base", "themeVariables": { "pie1": "#FF5733", "pie2": "#33FF57", "pie3": "#3357FF", "pieStrokeColor": "#000000", "pieStrokeWidth": 3, "pieOpacity": 0.8 }}}%%

This looks like it works on this site too.

pjotApr 15, 2026
To be fair, pie charts are horrible in general.
laserbeamApr 15, 2026
The first thing I tried to do is resize that rectangle in the default diagram... and the resize handles do not affect the height, only the width. What is this "better" than?
MyrmornisApr 15, 2026
https://d2lang.com/ is a nicer language than Mermaid with much nicer visual appearance. It would be great if it became more widely supported.
growrowApr 15, 2026
What makes it nicer?
MyrmornisApr 15, 2026
Take a look at https://d2lang.com/examples/dagre/ and https://d2lang.com/tour/intro/

The language is richer and all diagram types are implemented consistently in the same language in a way that can be composed, as opposed to being a collection of unrelated DSLs.

The improved visual appearance is clear from inspecting example diagrams, I believe.

lugaoApr 15, 2026
Does it produce real svgs as opposed to foreign object html in svg mess that mermaid compilers produce?
erajasekarApr 15, 2026
I reached the same conclusion after comparing diagram-as-code tools — D2 feels cleaner and more expressive than Mermaid.

I’ve been working on an AI diagramming tool built around D2: https://aidiagrammaker.com/ You describe a system in plain English, and it generates architecture diagrams, flowcharts, and sequence diagrams in D2.

Edits can be made either directly in the D2 code or via a context-aware editor.

neuronexmachinaApr 15, 2026
I agree that it's nicer and more powerful, but it's a little concerning it hasn't had any commits in the past 6 months: https://github.com/terrastruct/d2/commits/master/
nine_kApr 15, 2026
Maybe it doesn't need constant fixing? Are there many issues in the tracker?
16bitvoidApr 15, 2026
I think the founder/lead developer, Alexander Wang, works at OpenAI now.

Plus, according to this comment on an issue, folks in their discord say it's not being actively maintained.

https://github.com/terrastruct/d2/issues/2735#issuecomment-4...

vladsanchezApr 15, 2026
Never imagined Scale.ai CEO was D2Lang creator nor that he joined his room-mate at OpenAI (giggle).

Thanks for sharing

spacecowApr 15, 2026
Oh, finally, something that supports actual hierarchical state diagrams (that isn't Graphviz, no offense)... Mermaid's "You cannot define transitions between internal states belonging to different composite states" [1] has driven me up a wall for years.

  parentA.childA -> parentB.childB: voop
  parentB.childB -> parentA: vorp 
shouldn't be that hard!

[1] https://mermaid.ai/open-source/syntax/stateDiagram.html#comp...

jauntywundrkindApr 15, 2026
How good is the LLM at creating d2? What if any skills/material can folks recommend? (Follow-up: D2-mcp has a cheat sheet, https://github.com/h0rv/d2-mcp/blob/main/d2/CHEATSHEET.md)

And, does GitHub support it? (Follow up: alas not! Sadness. Please add!)

wpsApr 15, 2026
Has anyone here used https://pikchr.org/ from the creator of SQLite?
ArubisApr 15, 2026
I will grant this: that's a brilliant name and domain.
Lord_ZeroApr 15, 2026
How does the agent session thing work? Server-side you proxy requests to client via websockets or something? How does the agent see the client-side data?
smusamashahApr 15, 2026
How is this one better? I thought this was going to be a visual editor where you click and edit on the diagram itself. I don't seem to be able to do that here.
juancnApr 15, 2026
It's pretty but I don't know about better.

- How do you pan? Two finger sliding on the trackpad just zooms.

- Why does the diagram you're working on doesn't use all the remaining space? I picked one example and it's on a small-ish box with controls that don't seem to do anything and half of it is out the screen on the bottom

Ohh... the scroll metaphor... it's annoying. A bunch of tabs would have been better or even a one at a time with a tree somewhere.

There's too much fighting with layout where a plain interface would be better, something closer to https://mermaid.live/

lo1tumaApr 15, 2026
I actually like Mermaid’s text-based approach a lot and wouldn’t want to replace it with a visual editor.

Where I do see room for improvement is the rendering quality. A lot of diagrams end up looking a bit rough, especially with arrow routing and layout, which can feel somewhat arbitrary.

Better layout/rendering would probably add more value (for me at least) than improving the editing experience.