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.

Tool: Mermaid to ASCII art mermaid-ascii https://tools.simonwillison.net/mermaid-ascii After building the Mermaid to ASCII tool based on Grok Build's Rust code https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/16/grok-mermaid/ I learned that there's an older, more fully-featured Go library called AlexanderGrooff/mermaid-ascii https://github.com/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 https://simonwillison.net/tags/go , tools https://simonwillison.net/tags/tools , webassembly https://simonwillison.net/tags/webassembly , mermaid https://simonwillison.net/tags/mermaid