Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Anyone have recommendations for a simple text-based flowchart specification format? Something that a human can read and easily understand in plaintext, but can also be rendered as a graphic?

The current solutions we have at my work are extremely difficult to use with VCS.

I've looked at Mermaid [0], but it is pretty limiting in its feature set.

I typically use draw.io/mxGraph [1] when I'm making diagrams and flowcharts, but the XML-based file format is pretty overwhelming for humans to read.

[0] https://mermaidjs.github.io

[1] https://github.com/jgraph/mxgraph




plantUML[0] may be what you're looking for, specifically the activity diagrams[1].I've been using it extensively for sequence diagrams (has more features than websequencediagrams.com). Most recently I've been using this C4 architecture diagrams extension[2]. There's a VSCode preview extension[3] and a docker image[4] for running a plantUML server locally that lets me create and share version controlled diagrams with my colleagues easily.

I especially like that there's an ascii renderer for the sequence diagrams that makes embedding them in Readme's very easy

[0] http://plantuml.com/ [1] http://plantuml.com/activity-diagram-beta [2] https://github.com/RicardoNiepel/C4-PlantUML [3] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=jebbs.pl... [4] https://hub.docker.com/r/plantuml/plantuml-server/


There's always the ancient "Pic" language by Brian Kernighan, e.g.: http://mtorrest.sitios.ing.uc.cl/downloads/latex/flowchart.p...



GraphViz?


What?




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: