Show HN: Ferrite – Markdown editor in Rust with native Mermaid diagram rendering (github.com)

Is mermaid rendering implemented in Rust, or are you running mermaid.js in a JS interpreter somewhere?

On other systems I’ve run into challenges rendering markdown documents with many mermaid diagrams in them. It would be nice to have a more robust way to do this.

I happily paid money for Typora, which does roughly the same thing for just Markdown without support for JSON, Yaml (that I know of). This feels like a ripe space, especially with LLMs eagerly outputting reams of parseable text with embedded diagrams.

Nice to see an egui project that doesn't have super obvious egui aesthetics.

How did you find working with egui?

Made with egui, if anyones wondering.

I love the new era of graphical applications in Rust.

seems like a promising alternative to obsidian, but missing [[wikilinks]] and back references

Consider adding support for Typst.

For those who, like me, read this and thought "what the hell is a mermaid diagram?", apparently it is a method to describe simple flow diagrams using markdown-like text. More here: https://mermaid.js.org/

Building an api client based on markdown as well - https://voiden.md

Made the fan in my Windows 11 laptop spin up.

Nice to see native markdown rendering rather than relying on spawning chromium and taking screenshots like some other libraries do!

This is cool. I was hoping to see progress coming from Zed (e.g. because Tree-sitter → https://github.com/tree-sitter-grammars/tree-sitter-markdown) but it's exciting to see this. I'm a heavy Obsidian user, and I love it, but I'd love to see real alternatives focused on foundations.

It would be interesting to know more about the end-goal if any.

Best of luck! I'll watch this.

Whats the advantage of using Ferrite versus VS Code with a Mermaid extension?

Any interest in a plugin system similar to Obsidian?

Why did you remove AI agent configurations and instructions from the repo? See .gitignore

Like the idea but it spawns a terminal on startup on Mac and is not WYSIWYG (like Obsidian). Hope this project develops into usable state soon.

Will need a magnifying glass to see the text on the screenshots.

I find it makes sense to take screenshots in a window big enough to show what's going on, but no bigger. This means probably not full screen, or maximised, especially if you're running at a very high resolution. If there's a lot of dead/empty space in the window that's a signal it's too big. This way you guarantee the screenshots are readable without zooming in, on smaller displays than your own, for example mobile.

Doesn't install on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS due to dependecy problems. Filed a bug: https://github.com/OlaProeis/Ferrite/issues/6

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Looking at the Screenshots, this would've taken days/weeks e.g. 5 years ago. Now this seems to be vibe coded in 2 sessions. Crazy world we live in.

Seems like Mermaid parsing and layout would be a useful crate as by itself. I would enjoy a fast mermaid layout command line tool with svg/pdf/png support, which I think would be quite feasible to implement with such a crate.

The main issue is that Markdown remains a pretty primitive language to write documents in, with dozens of incompatible extensions all over the place.

I don't know if it's the best format to focus on.

We need privacy-focused Obsidian alternative (which doesn't store unencrypted text files on disk), excited to see a potential player written in my tech stack, meaning it should be easy to extend!

It’s a cool name but there is already another project called ferrite, related to audio recording. https://www.wooji-juice.com/products/ferrite/

Looks interesting! I’m discouraged from using mermaid and D2’s online playground for privacy reasons and have hand on my roadmap to get a local editor. This might be it! Does it support theming of mermaid diagrams, I noted the style keywords were in the roadmap still.

Slightly off topic: is there any editor (and data format) that supports re-arranging mermaid charts? I often find myself wanting to slightly tweak the way the chart is rendered, e.g. moving around boxes so that some of them are clustered in a specific area etc.