January 28, 2026
Mermaids, Makeovers & Terminal Tea
Beautiful Mermaid
ASCII glow-up has devs swooning while skeptics side-eye the demo
TLDR: Beautiful Mermaid turns text diagrams into fast, polished images for web and neat ASCII art for terminals. The crowd cheers the glow-up and simple themes, but gripes about a demo tied to an AI platform and asks whether math-friendly LaTeX support will actually happen.
Craft’s new Beautiful Mermaid promises a glamorous makeover for nerdy diagrams—pretty web images (SVG) and crisp text art (ASCII), zero clutter, and instant theme switches. It’s aimed at coding with AI helpers, where visualizing flowcharts and system maps quickly makes the brain go “ahhh.” Fans are hyped: one user practically serenaded ASCII, joking they can “cat” a diagram in the terminal and still have it look sharp. Another cheered the glow-up: “Mermaid is great, but can we make it look… professional?” Consider that box checked.
Then the drama: a tester tried the live demo and hit a wall—apparently you need to download an AI agent platform. Cue side-eyes. “Love the concept, not the required install,” grumbled one would-be fan. On the nerdier edge, an academic crowd popped in asking about LaTeX (the math typesetting tool), because base Mermaid struggles there. Meanwhile, someone tossed a power-up: pair this with UnicodePlots for terminal charts, and you’re cooking. There were also shoutouts to Monodraw for handcrafted ASCII art.
So the mood? Excited about gorgeous, fast diagrams across chat and terminal, divided on the demo download, and curious whether this mermaid can swim in the math ocean. It’s a makeover story—with a little terminal tea spilled.
Key Points
- •beautiful-mermaid renders Mermaid diagrams to both SVG and ASCII/Unicode with zero DOM dependencies.
- •Built by Craft for use in Craft Agents, it targets AI-assisted programming workflows and terminal environments.
- •Supports five diagram types: Flowcharts, State, Sequence, Class, and ER, with performance claims of 100+ diagrams under 500ms.
- •The theming system includes Mono Mode (two-color derivation via CSS color-mix()) and Enriched Mode (optional overrides), with live switching via CSS custom properties.
- •Offers full Shiki compatibility for VS Code themes and ships with 15 built-in themes; installation via npm, bun, or pnpm with quick-start examples.