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Simon Willison · · 1 min read

Mermaid to ASCII art (mermaid-ascii)

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16th July 2026

Tool Mermaid to ASCII art (mermaid-ascii) — Convert Mermaid diagram syntax into ASCII and Unicode box-drawing art rendered entirely in your browser using a Go library compiled to WebAssembly. The tool supports flowcharts with labeled edges, subgraphs, and color definitions, as well as sequence diagrams with notes and control flow fragments, while offering customizable padding and output options.

After building the Mermaid to ASCII tool based on Grok Build's Rust code I learned that there's an older, more fully-featured Go library called AlexanderGrooff/mermaid-ascii that implements a similar pattern, so I had Claude Fable 5 compile that one to WebAssembly as well so I could compare the two.

This one includes support for colors!

Screenshot of a Mermaid diagram editor web app. A row of tab buttons reads: Flowchart, Multiple links, Subgraphs, Multi-line labels, Colors (selected, highlighted blue), Sequence, Alt fragment, Loop + note, Parallel. Below is a text input area containing: "graph LR / Build:::good --> Test:::good / Test --> Deploy:::warn / Deploy --> Rollback:::bad / classDef good color:#3fb950 / classDef warn color:#e3b341 / classDef bad color:#ff7b72". A control row shows an unchecked "ASCII only" checkbox, "Padding X: 5", "Padding Y: 5", "Box padding: 1", and buttons "Copy as text" and "Copy link to this diagram". At the bottom on a black background is the rendered left-to-right flowchart with four connected boxes: "Build" (green text), "Test" (green text), "Deploy" (yellow text), "Rollback" (red text), each linked by arrows.

Posted 16th July 2026 at 2:57 pm

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