90.2k stars · MIT · @mermaid-js/tiny@11.17.2 (2026-08-25) · Track this in Scout
Diagrams from a few lines of plain text, rendered natively by GitHub, Notion, Obsidian and Claude.
▶Repo detailsthe review · specs · pros & cons
What it is
A library that renders diagrams — flowcharts, mind maps, timelines, sequences — from a few lines of plain text. GitHub, Notion, Obsidian and Claude all render Mermaid natively, so the recipient needs nothing installed.
What it is good for. A diagram drawn inside an app usually stays inside that app. The moment a user wants it in a report, a wiki page or a message to a colleague, the best they can do is a screenshot — a dead image with the product cropped out of the frame. A "Copy as Mermaid" button turns the diagram into portable text that redraws itself wherever it is pasted, and every one of those places is a surface where somebody else’s colleague sees the shape of the output. That is the cheapest distribution mechanism available to a tool of this kind, and it costs one serialiser over the tree the app already holds in state. It is also a second, phone-friendly view of a hierarchy alongside react-arborist (Ed. 7 #11).
- Renders natively on GitHub, in Notion and in Claude — no library for the person you send it to.
- The output is small, diffable text, so it can live in a repo or a document.
- Its mindmap and flowchart types match the shape a topic map or an outline already has.
- Layout control is limited: a two-hundred-node map will come out ugly and there is little you can do.
- Embedding the renderer in the app itself adds real weight — prefer exporting text over shipping the library.
- Text export loses your styling and the drill-in interaction entirely; it is a portable summary, not the product.
It is also a second, phone-friendly view of the hierarchy alongside react-arborist (Ed.
