Mermaid Diagramming

Mermaid diagramming was a concept of using text commands to create flowchart-like diagrams. 

This idea was realised in MermaidJs which renders Markdown-inspired text definitions to create and modify diagrams. It is a competitor to Lucid Chart.

Among the different charts Mermaid can build are the old database favourite of entity-relationship diagrams (E-R diagrams). Conventionally, we represent entities with capital letters and relations with lowercase letters.  The crow's foot notation is used to connect entities; intuitively expressing the idea of 1-many relationships.

Another popular chart is a sequence diagram. These express interactions between entities, e.g. the favourite Alice and Bob interactions in cryptography interactions. Entities can be expressed as rectangular boxes by default, but stick men can be used as icons too using the actor syntax.

Quadrant charts, or 2x2 matrices, can easily be built as well. These are common in consulting e.g. the BCG matrix, also known as the product-portfolio matrix. It helps to identify promising investment areas and areas which should be closed down e.g. low growth and low market share quadrant products.

Architecture diagrams can also be rendered in Mermaid.

There are also various experimental diagrams such as Sankey diagrams, which are used in science, especially physics.

Mermaid chart rendering is now available in the latest Visual Studio 2022 update.