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Ąžuolas Saulius
Ąžuolas Saulius

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I built a visual editor for Mermaid diagrams in VS Code

Mermaid diagrams are great because they are plain text, live with the code, and work well in Git. Writing the syntax gets tedious once a diagram becomes large.

So I built FlowForge, a visual Mermaid editor for VS Code.

Open an .mmd file and you get a canvas, Mermaid source, and a live preview. Drag nodes, draw connections, and edit labels visually. The three views stay in sync, but the file remains a normal Mermaid file that works with other tools.

I built this because I think diagrams can make spec driven development more practical. A system model can stay close to the original human intent, while still giving agentic tools a clear, structured spec to work from. For complex systems, that is often faster than trying to explain everything in a long document or a chat prompt.

I am still improving connection routing, text editing, clearer flowchart arrows, and support for more diagram types.

Flowforge is now available in the VS Code Marketplace:

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=sauliusd3v.flowforge

It is open source under the MIT license. Source: https://github.com/SauliusDev/flowforge

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