alt.hn

2/14/2026 at 9:42:11 PM

Show HN: Auto-Layouting ASCII Diagrams

 https://github.com/switz/box-of-rain

by switz

2/14/2026 at 9:56:05 PM

Neat, but you can just do this in mermaid too. Taking one of your examples:

  <mermaid>
  flowchart LR

  web([Frontend])

  subgraph platform [Cloud Platform]
    api([API Server])
    db[(Database)]
    api --> db
  end

  web -->|HTTPS| api
  </mermaid>
If you install the latest https://oj-hn.com , you can see it rendered inline here.

by latchkey

2/15/2026 at 12:47:45 AM

Fair point. I added basic mermaid parsing to the library so you can do that here too.

by switz