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[ARTICLE · art-62904] src=simonwillison.net ↗ pub= topic=developer-tools verified=true sentiment=· neutral

Mermaid to ASCII art (mermaid-ascii)

Simon Willison compiled the Go library AlexanderGrooff/mermaid-ascii to WebAssembly, creating a tool that converts Mermaid diagrams to ASCII art with color support. The tool is available online and offers an alternative to a previous Rust-based version.

read1 min views1 publishedJul 16, 2026

Tool: Mermaid to ASCII art (mermaid-ascii) 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!

Tags: go, tools, webassembly, mermaid

source & further reading
simonwillison.net — original article Firefox in WebAssembly Quoting Thibault Sottiaux Quoting Linus Torvalds
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