While I can see how point-and-clickers love things like this, I prefer building connections using markup. So things like Graphviz, PlantUML, and Mermaid appeal to me. However, they leave a lot left to be desired in terms of simplicity. Wouldn't YAML or something similar be better at representing connections, and just have some markup options for types?
If you are going to let the program do the layout automatically, then graphviz dot already does really good, right?
I think the reason people make these projects is specifically because they want to manually place some nodes at particular 2d positions, which I think is a little difficult if you are just recording nodes and connections. (I think many people are not as excited about solutions like "just use a bunch of invisible edges to enforce additional position requirements" as us).
We think maybe we should add a layout alg. based on the input being relative or absolute grid position (plus maybe unconstrained nodes). Someone should create a summer intern project to get this started.
