jamesmunns

James Munns

@jamesmunns

Doing embedded stuff

Be nice, work hard. Build tools, tell stories. Start five year fights. Kein Ort für Nazis.

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jamesmunns
@jamesmunns

thing request

please someone mash together an autorouter/pathfinding algorithm with something like mermaid/dot graphs, so we can have arrows that don't go absolutely bonkers and overlap everything else in the graph.

Also I'd love SOME way to hint at orientation, like "this group goes to the right of this group", but this probably falls into "impossible to do what everyone actually wants" territory. Most of the time I wish I could naively describe the graph, and "touch it up" manually afterwards.

I hate drawing graphs manually, but every (OSS) tool I've used becomes completely degenerate when you have more like 10 entities, which is exactly the case where I want procedurally generated graphs instead of manual ones.

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in reply to @jamesmunns's post:

lexi
@lexi

yes please i need this

also if you did not know it already check out excalidraw.com for when mermaid is shitting itself again. it is by far my fav semi-manual drawing tool

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jamesmunns
@jamesmunns

Yeah, I've used a ton of gui-driven tools, but honestly my favorite is Concepts on an iPad with an apple pencil. Having multi-touch and a pen is just killer. All the PC and web based ones are possible to make nice graphs, it just takes me forever, and falls apart for me when I'm like, "oh shit this box inside a box needs more boxes inside of it", and you have to rescale and re-layout a whole chunk. At least with concepts, I can zoom in to draw smaller boxes, or group-select and expand the whole current drawing.

In mermaid (for example with C4C graphs), you just make a new nested boundary scope.

The big downside to Concept is that it is vector based, which means that version control is pretty much not a thing. Great for one-offs, not great for "living" or "exploratory" graphing/drawing.

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lexi
@lexi

concepts seems really nice! from what ive seen about it, its more about drawing, while excali basically just gives you a few shapes, options for those and a few other tools and you can use those, its pretty minimal but still very useful

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lexi
@lexi

also, as you can tell, or rather not tell, excali has excellent PWA support. that is not a standalone app or electron, that is just a chrome window :3

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