I hadn't heard of D2, but I love the idea that I can create my charts directly in Neovim in the terminal to get a rough draft, and do a final render with a pretty picture.
I will be playing with this shortly.
alixanderwang · 3h ago
Hello fellow devs. Just wanted to share a new feature we added this morning, though it's very alpha stage (already someone's filed a github issue for it hah)
I thought your playground wasn't working as it renders black text on black background. Maybe I have darkmode enabled or something. Other renderers work, but ascii is invisible.
alixanderwang · 1h ago
Ah right, forgot to test the update with dark mode. Thanks for letting me know!
edit: fixed
smusamashah · 1h ago
I maintain a list of browser based text to diagram tools (which I have shared a number of times here). I recently realised that the online version of D2 does NOT work solely in browser, diagram's are generated by backend servers.
Can D2 work in browser by itself? Does the extension mentioned in the post work offline? (lots of tools do)
alixanderwang · 1h ago
It does now! (As of a week ago)
Check out the network tab in the d2 playground. It's powered by d2.js, a wrapper around a wasm port of d2, which we've recently been working on. Not super officially ready yet but soon to be, and will be a separate announcement.
Thanks for sharing. Looking at the first section- official mermaid playground supports both ui and text editing. It's been a life changer.
robertlagrant · 3h ago
This looks cool. And I saw the previous post you got C4 support! I'm just about to do some C4 things; I'll check it out.
reactordev · 3h ago
The vim extension is such a flex...
Graziano_M · 1h ago
Yeah, but weird/unfortunate that it's written in vimscript.
gsinclair · 5m ago
How on earth can it be weird that a vim extension is written in vimscript?!
jiehong · 1h ago
I’ve been using d2 for sequences diagrams or migration diagrams and I like it!
This new feature is interesting!
eric-p7 · 2h ago
Not to be confused with The D Programming Language, which has a similar domain (dlang.org), and is currently on version 2.
sidewndr46 · 1h ago
Does this mean a quine is possible?
cluckindan · 41m ago
Yes, but the only one I found on the playground is all newlines and spaces.
In escaped form:
\x20\n\x20\n\x20\n\n
bxpn77 · 2h ago
Super cool!
jillesvangurp · 3h ago
Llm to text to diagram is the killer workflow these days.
The key challenge is making these things presentable. Optimizing them for human editability is a secondary concern at this point. This is where a lot of these tools fall apart.
justonceokay · 2h ago
I use LLM to tell my children bedtime stories and to wish my wife goodnight. Saves me a lot of time and energy
billyp-rva · 2h ago
> Llm to text to diagram is the killer workflow these days.
It's useful, but I think only marginally. When using a diagrams-as-code tool, having an LLM write it for you gets you up and running faster, but long term you have more control (and no hallucinations) just writing the code yourself. It'll probably be fewer keystrokes in the end. Doubly so if your diagrams-as-code tool has decent autocomplete.
thejazzman · 4m ago
i think d2 looks sick , and i'm not op, but i do love just describing my system and telling the LLM to draw it. so having it "draw" d2 seems like a great new step?
when you want to make changes, you update your docs/design and repeat. think system design interview but you skip drawing it yourself at all and then sanity check your own work by interpreting the resulting graph etc
I hadn't heard of D2, but I love the idea that I can create my charts directly in Neovim in the terminal to get a rough draft, and do a final render with a pretty picture.
I will be playing with this shortly.
If you want to skip the blog post and poke around directly: https://play.d2lang.com/?script=qlDQtVOotFLIyFTwSEzOTi1S8Est...
For a bigger example: https://play.d2lang.com/?script=rJJBjtswDEX3OgWBrm2kzU4Feoru...
edit: fixed
Can D2 work in browser by itself? Does the extension mentioned in the post work offline? (lots of tools do)
Check out the network tab in the d2 playground. It's powered by d2.js, a wrapper around a wasm port of d2, which we've recently been working on. Not super officially ready yet but soon to be, and will be a separate announcement.
Edit: found it! Thanks.
This new feature is interesting!
In escaped form:
The key challenge is making these things presentable. Optimizing them for human editability is a secondary concern at this point. This is where a lot of these tools fall apart.
It's useful, but I think only marginally. When using a diagrams-as-code tool, having an LLM write it for you gets you up and running faster, but long term you have more control (and no hallucinations) just writing the code yourself. It'll probably be fewer keystrokes in the end. Doubly so if your diagrams-as-code tool has decent autocomplete.
when you want to make changes, you update your docs/design and repeat. think system design interview but you skip drawing it yourself at all and then sanity check your own work by interpreting the resulting graph etc