Feature request: draw graph in ascii art

[cdmihai]

I'd like to include mermaid graphs in text heavy environments which don't always embed images / attachments well (markdown, wikis, emails, chat, etc). One option is to have the live mermaid editor generate ASCII art which I can then copy paste into my text / markdown documents.

[felickz]

inspiration: https://plantuml.com/ascii-art

[mzvast]

I like this feature

[MKyhos]

With the now available Mermaid support in Github Markdown, this is probably not necessary from initial intention, however it would still be sometimes useful if one wants to include diagrams directly in the code comments (or is this a rare use case?)

[devthejo]

and for output of a cli it would be great too

[esafirm]

This would be nice and we can move on from asciiflow 😄

[KSDaemon]

yeah. One of the cases for this: IETF RFCs are still rendered as plain texts. So even if you want to use some up-to-date awesome tool for diagrams, you still need to convert them to the ASCII representation. If you can not do it automatically — then the only option is just not to use cool tools at all ((( And create diagrams from the beginning by hand is asciiflow for example.

[OR13]

I would love a way to convert mermaid to ascii for use in IETF RFCs.

[peppelinux]

I'm looking for this feature, it would be very useful having it!

[ayush29feb]

Also looking for this feature for the CLI output

[maral]

If you can't live without it, ChatGPT can create somewhat good enough head start which you can edit yourself - it is really bad at counting characters, so you'll have to add the right amount of spaces yourself:

I tried like 5 extra prompts to convince it to fix it and nothing was perfect.

[wanghenshui]

it's really helpful in code comment

[kebot]

I recently found Diagon, it has it's own-syntax but very similar to Mermaid. To use in the web environment, we can try https://github.com/elmouradiaminedev/diagonjs which looks like a webassembly wrapper of the Diagon library.

You can also try out the online demo here -> https://arthursonzogni.com/Diagon/

[andyfeller]

speaking as a maintainer of the GitHub CLI, I would love to enhance gh issue view or any of the other commands to render an ASCII version of Mermaid diagram for GitHub users.

found https://github.com/AlexanderGrooff/mermaid-ascii from @AlexanderGrooff, need to see how it compare to alternates but just wanted to share interest ❤ ty for supporting durable communication

[traversebitree]

Reminder.

[AlexanderGrooff]

Thanks for the mention @andyfeller. I've added some more features to the https://github.com/AlexanderGrooff/mermaid-ascii repo and you can check out a demo on https://mermaid-ascii.art.

Let me know what you think! I'm more than happy to help out.

[andyfeller]

Thanks, @AlexanderGrooff! 🙌

The GitHub CLI leverages https://github.com/charmbracelet/glamour for rendering markdown within the terminal, which is built on https://github.com/yuin/goldmark. I'll have to look into the extension support used for GFM to see what is needed to wire this into the toolchain.