Mermaid users struggle to preview and export diagrams across tools
Developers and documentation authors encounter uneven Mermaid support across editors, terminals, and documentation workflows. Standalone files may need extra editor extensions, terminal Markdown readers may not render diagrams, and preview workflows may lack direct image export. Layout control is another frustration; people report switching diagram languages when Mermaid’s rendering does not suit them.
For developers and documentation authors who use Mermaid. Mentioned from Oct 2015 to Sep 2026 on GitHub and Hacker News.
12 different people described this problem in 10 separate discussions.
- Indie fit
- 3.0/10
- Pain
- 4.5/10
- Frequency
- 9.3/10
- Willingness to pay
- 0.0/10
- Momentum
- 5.3/10
- Who pays
- Professionals
- Competition
- High
- Build difficulty
- Medium
What people said
Quoted word for word. Follow a link to read the whole discussion.
In the meantime, I created a simple wrapper script that uses mermaid-ascii to render mermaid diagrams before passing to glow: https://gist.github.com/olavocarvalho/749053cb283642044064b93f183a056b
It would be nice if .mmd or .mermaid files were automatically recognized and rendered as I am restricted to using those (other tools only support them, and in general it is not a bad design choice to keep large diagrams in separate files) and now I need to have two extensions installed to be able to live-preview my mer…
Build brief
See what to build and who will buy it
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- 4 places to find your first customers
- 10 more quotes from people who have this problem
- Current workarounds, existing solutions and risks