Hi HN, I made lini over the past few months, It's a small language for drawing figures from plain text, compiled to SVG by a single Rust binary. Same syntax for flowcharts, sequence diagrams, mindmaps, ER schemas and charts, and also circuit schematics, floor plans and dimensioned engineering drawings.

A small one looks like this:

  { |svc::box| { fill: --teal-wash; stroke: --teal-ink } }

  |group| "Services" [ |svc#api| "API"; |svc#auth| "Auth" ]
  |svc#db| "Postgres"

  api  -> db "read"
  auth -> db "write"

{ } is style, [ ] is children, and naming two nodes draws a link. lini routes it around whatever is in the way.

The SVG has no JS in it. Every colour is a CSS variable with a light-dark() pair, so one file follows the reader's dark mode, and one line of CSS on the page recolours all the diagrams on it.

It's also fast and deterministic, about 2 ms for a typical figure and byte-identical output every run, so the SVGs diff cleanly in CI. You don't need Node or a headless browser to render anything.

The playground on the site is the same compiler built to wasm. There's also cargo install lini, plugins for mdBook, remark (Docusaurus/MDX) and Astro, and extensions for VS Code and Zed. Repo: https://github.com/monfa-red/lini

Would really like to hear what breaks, or what you'd want it to draw that it can't

Thanks