Thanks for making that! Just a heads up, reladraw is changing super fast - I think the rendering/highlighting will work smoothly with syntax changes, the more annoying thing would be any JS API breaking changes.
No problem! I hooked up dependabot to detect upstream changes, so when you bump up the version number, it should create a PR and bump the version number of the extension, and I will merge. I think the unit tests should catch any regression.
There's a similarity, but they differ in how you say what you want. pic is turtle graphics with explicit placement with coords and offsets as needed. reladraw is all about relationships (and not having to specify coordinates/offsets/distances).
That's an interesting idea. I already have planned for some programmer-like features (functions, custom attributes, variables). However, what you're talking about seems like maybe it would want to take in an outside file (e.g., CSV, JSON) and say "loop over every entity in add as a child in this container", that sort of thing?
Am I getting that right? Super curious, because that sounds cool.
Exactly, like a server map f.ex., would be neat to have it rendered from a dataset or when developing you often have the ability to spit out CSV,JSON,etc.
It's a great starting point and I can see functions,etc being useful for other purposes so I think there's a tightrope to be walked in the design to be extensible but not get bogged down early either (if a function can result in an enumeration, you don't need a specific CSV/JSON syntax if it's just the result of a function.. but that adds other complciations naturally).
Thanks for mentioning TALA. I feel like TALA does add more control than Mermaid, but in spirit sits closer to Mermaid than Reladraw. It keeps the auto layout, but with extra ways to coax the diagram into a different shape, by saying things like "keep this node pinned over here" or "keep these nodes close to one another".
For the diagrams I usually want to create, that's still not enough control to create what I envision.
Thanks! Some serious food for thought. Next up, I'm planning on custom attributes, functions, etc. that a user doesn't have to use, but a more programmer-oriented user would probably enjoy having access to. But, I think I see what you're saying about a sequence diagram and that would only be a partial answer. I'll have to give that more thought!
And, I'm not wedded to the "no multi-line statements". That's more a philosophy of the super early versions of keeping it simple. I noticed some of the playground examples could already benefit from even simple line continuation. The philosophy there would be, if people don't like line continuation, they don't have to use it, but for those who want it, give them a convenient way to do it. Good point about the forward slash char... so much food for thought. Really appreciate the thoughtful comment.
Thanks :) A great question. So, I believe Github simply built in support for Mermaid as just something they natively support. That means getting reladraw to "just work" in Github markdown files is sorta not possible. The workaround is rendering to SVG and linking to the SVG (obviously not nearly as convenient).
For tools like IntelliJ, VSCode, Obsidian, they would be easier to get working I think, as they all support plugins/extensions. That way, they'd know what to do when they encounter a fenced-in area starting with ```reladraw.
