D2 (text to diagram tool) now supports ASCII renders
17 comments
·August 19, 2025alixanderwang
rng-concern
I thought your playground wasn't working as it renders black text on black background. Maybe I have darkmode enabled or something. Other renderers work, but ascii is invisible.
alixanderwang
Ah right, forgot to test the update with dark mode. Thanks for letting me know!
smusamashah
I maintain a list of browser based text to diagram tools (which I have shared a number of times here). I recently realised that the online version of D2 does NOT work solely in browser, diagram's are generated by backend servers.
Can D2 work in browser by itself? Does the extension mentioned in the post work offline? (lots of tools do)
alixanderwang
It does now! (As of a week ago)
Check out the network tab in the d2 playground. It's powered by d2.js, a wrapper around a wasm port of d2, which we've recently been working on. Not super officially ready yet but soon to be, and will be a separate announcement.
rendall
~~May I see that list, please?~~
Edit: found it! Thanks.
jiehong
I’ve been using d2 for sequences diagrams or migration diagrams and I like it!
This new feature is interesting!
robertlagrant
This looks cool. And I saw the previous post you got C4 support! I'm just about to do some C4 things; I'll check it out.
sidewndr46
Does this mean a quine is possible?
eric-p7
Not to be confused with The D Programming Language, which has a similar domain (dlang.org), and is currently on version 2.
reactordev
The vim extension is such a flex...
Graziano_M
Yeah, but weird/unfortunate that it's written in vimscript.
bxpn77
Super cool!
jillesvangurp
Llm to text to diagram is the killer workflow these days.
The key challenge is making these things presentable. Optimizing them for human editability is a secondary concern at this point. This is where a lot of these tools fall apart.
justonceokay
I use LLM to tell my children bedtime stories and to wish my wife goodnight. Saves me a lot of time and energy
billyp-rva
> Llm to text to diagram is the killer workflow these days.
It's useful, but I think only marginally. When using a diagrams-as-code tool, having an LLM write it for you gets you up and running faster, but long term you have more control (and no hallucinations) just writing the code yourself. It'll probably be fewer keystrokes in the end. Doubly so if your diagrams-as-code tool has decent autocomplete.
Hello fellow devs. Just wanted to share a new feature we added this morning, though it's very alpha stage (already someone's filed a github issue for it hah)
If you want to skip the blog post and poke around directly: https://play.d2lang.com/?script=qlDQtVOotFLIyFTwSEzOTi1S8Est...
For a bigger example: https://play.d2lang.com/?script=rJJBjtswDEX3OgWBrm2kzU4Feoru...