Mastodawn

I've been playing with pikchr ('picture') a markup language for diagrams. Made a simple calendar which I can now add events to.

It's an ideal language for this kind of thing - well suited for structured diagrams but not so rigid you can't just pop a box wherever you like with some text in it.

Pikchr is 0-clause BSD and there is an online playground so no install needed:

https://pikchr.org/
https://pikchr.org/home/pikchrshow

#FOSS #OpenSource #Pikchr

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Jared Jennings Oct 8

@wvc when i want to show connections between things, but their relative positions don't mean anything, i use #graphviz. when positions do matter, i use #pikchr. if i'm not sure what i want to show, or there are multiple things to show from the same dataset, or the data changes, i generate graphviz from the data. netbox, php-ipam, racktables may support your use case more specifically, but it sounds like you want something more open-ended.

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remcycles Aug 16, 2025

@jaredj I've been using #pikchr on my blog, and it's really nice to generate Pikchr output from a script.

DSP and CRC block diagrams: https://remcycles.net/blog/goertzel.html, https://remcycles.net/blog/crc_diagrams.html

Some animations (pikchrs->svgs->pngs->animated gifs): https://remcycles.net/blog/corr_viz.html

A Fixed-Point Implementation of the Goertzel Algorithm in C

Fabio Natali Jul 19, 2025

Oh my! This exists and I get to know of it only today?

#Pikchr, a markup language to generate diagrams.

https://pikchr.org

It's similar to Mermaid, I guess, but written in C, not in JavaScript (yay!).

It supports both light and dark mode (super yay!).

Aaand... it's in Guix (nifty!). https://codeberg.org/guix/guix/src/branch/master/gnu/packages/pikchr.scm

I can't wait to try it out.

Pikchr: Documentation

Marcos Dione Jun 24, 2025

Last week at work I used #pikchr for the first time. It's a diagram generator that uses a text file as a source. This means that you can now easily keep track of your diagrams in a VCS (git, bah). It took me a couple of days to get used to the way it wors.

Unluckily right now the site seems down to me, but here's the link:

https://pikchr.org/

They have an online version, which is the one I used, but there's also a CLI you can install locally... at least on #Linux.

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Marco Bresciani May 4, 2025

@jaredj
There was #PlantUML, then someone else created #Mermaid (not sure it fit #Emacs, though), now #Pikchr...

https://xkcd.com/927/

@SReyCoyrehourcq

Standards

xkcd

Jared Jennings May 3, 2025

#Pikchr (pikchr.org) is a great little piece of software from the SQLite folks. It parses a little language for describing diagrams with boxes and lines and things, and puts out SVG.

#OrgMode (orgmode.org) has, among many other things, a way you can make code notebooks, #OrgBabel. Like #Jupyter, but less webby, and inside #Emacs, and supporting many languages - even multiple in the same document - thence its name.

Thanks to the ob-pikchr package by @SReyCoyrehourcq, Pikchr is one of the languages you can just write in the middle of your document this way.

Pikchr supports #darkmode, and I've just made a pull request that gets ob-pikchr in on the dark-mode game.

https://github.com/reyman/ob-pikchr/pull/1

Many thanks to Sebastien for the help ob-pikchr has provided in diagramming my thoughts! You go use it too!

#FreeSoftware

add dark mode support by jaredjennings · Pull Request #1 · reyman/ob-pikchr

Pikchr by default renders an SVG using black elements and a transparent background. When this picture is shown against a dark or black background, it can't be seen. But Pikchr has support for d...

GitHub

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remcycles Nov 22, 2024