Agreed, there's a lot missing here. Been using it a few hours now and here's a few problems with Diagram:
Pros:
- Some nice conceptual overlap with imperative programming. In theory could be very powerful.
- It comes with a nice set of product icons. This was the main draw for me TBH, I wish MermaidJS had these built in.
Cons:
- Having to regenerate each time you make a change. Needs a better UX, as you say. MermaidJS and others have nice web GUIs that react to changes, Diagram at best I can have side by side with my code editor and I manually regen with each change.
- Only outputs PNGs with white background? Why not transparent? Edit: You can change output format, and looks like there is a way to override some graphviz settings to achieve transparent background.
- Lots of rendering glitches, for edges in particular that seem to vanish at random.
- Justification is random - sometimes things center, sometimes they go to the top, sometimes the bottom, etc.
- Direction is completely broken. Clusters have a direction param that is entirely decorative as far as I can tell. It is impossible to tell what direction a set of items will end up having based on the code alone.
- Ordering is broken. You can group items with Python lists - cool! - but for some horrific reason Diagram ignores the list order and displays the items ordered by label alphabetically. Wtf? Edit: On further investigation this might actually just be reversing the list from the expected order? Hard to tell since direction is generally unpredictable.
I'm sure there are more positives, but the gaps have been so glaring and frustrating that I cannot imagine using this regularly in its current state.
Pros:
- Some nice conceptual overlap with imperative programming. In theory could be very powerful.
- It comes with a nice set of product icons. This was the main draw for me TBH, I wish MermaidJS had these built in.
Cons:
- Having to regenerate each time you make a change. Needs a better UX, as you say. MermaidJS and others have nice web GUIs that react to changes, Diagram at best I can have side by side with my code editor and I manually regen with each change.
- Only outputs PNGs with white background? Why not transparent? Edit: You can change output format, and looks like there is a way to override some graphviz settings to achieve transparent background.
- Lots of rendering glitches, for edges in particular that seem to vanish at random.
- Justification is random - sometimes things center, sometimes they go to the top, sometimes the bottom, etc.
- Direction is completely broken. Clusters have a direction param that is entirely decorative as far as I can tell. It is impossible to tell what direction a set of items will end up having based on the code alone.
- Ordering is broken. You can group items with Python lists - cool! - but for some horrific reason Diagram ignores the list order and displays the items ordered by label alphabetically. Wtf? Edit: On further investigation this might actually just be reversing the list from the expected order? Hard to tell since direction is generally unpredictable.
I'm sure there are more positives, but the gaps have been so glaring and frustrating that I cannot imagine using this regularly in its current state.