Beautiful Mermaid ASCII Rendering

Use lukilabs/beautiful-mermaid (a JS library, not a CLI) to turn Mermaid diagrams into terminal-friendly ASCII/Unicode art.

Quick start

Render a Mermaid file:

skills/beautiful-mermaid-ascii/scripts/mermaid-ascii path/to/diagram.mmd

Install a clean mermaid-ascii command on your PATH (symlink into ~/.local/bin by default):

skills/beautiful-mermaid-ascii/scripts/install-mermaid-ascii

Render from stdin:

cat path/to/diagram.mmd | skills/beautiful-mermaid-ascii/scripts/mermaid-ascii

Render the first Mermaid fenced block from Markdown:

skills/beautiful-mermaid-ascii/scripts/mermaid-ascii --md README.md

Select a different fenced block (1-based):

skills/beautiful-mermaid-ascii/scripts/mermaid-ascii --md README.md --block 2

Installation approach (how this skill “deals with installing”)

scripts/mermaid-ascii auto-installs beautiful-mermaid into a writable cache directory (defaults to $XDG_CACHE_HOME/beautiful-mermaid-ascii, or /tmp/beautiful-mermaid-ascii) when needed, then runs the renderer.

If you want a “real” command on your PATH, prefer the symlink installer:

skills/beautiful-mermaid-ascii/scripts/install-mermaid-ascii

You can also install this folder as a local/global npm package (use a writable npm cache if your ~/.npm is not writable):

# from the repo root
NPM_CONFIG_CACHE=/tmp/npm-cache npm install -g --prefix ~/.local ./skills/beautiful-mermaid-ascii

If you already have beautiful-mermaid installed in the current project, run with:

skills/beautiful-mermaid-ascii/scripts/mermaid-ascii --pkg-dir . path/to/diagram.mmd

Troubleshooting

• If installs fail due to permission errors in ~/.npm or ~/Library/Caches, run with a writable cache directory:
  • skills/beautiful-mermaid-ascii/scripts/mermaid-ascii --cache-dir /tmp/bm-cache ...
• If output is empty, verify the Mermaid text is valid and starts with a diagram type (flowchart, sequenceDiagram, etc.).
• For multiple diagrams in Markdown, use --list to enumerate fenced blocks and choose one with --block.

Bundled resources

• skills/beautiful-mermaid-ascii/scripts/mermaid-ascii: Shell wrapper that ensures dependencies are available, then renders.
• skills/beautiful-mermaid-ascii/scripts/mermaid-ascii.mjs: Node CLI that extracts Mermaid (raw or from Markdown fences) and calls renderMermaidAscii.
• skills/beautiful-mermaid-ascii/references/notes.md: Small notes about Mermaid inputs and common patterns.