Curious what you think about something, since it seems like you've been iterating on the challenge of a big interactive graph lately.

I've been pondering building a big interactive chart, like a decision tree or differential diagnosis chart, that maps goals/needs/problems to docs/examples/tools (for the Nix/NixOS/Nixpkgs ecosystem, but the basic concept applies to any sprawling ecosystem where discovery is hard).

I recently stumbled on https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid, which seems like it has an interaction model that could support what I have in mind (minus the question of whether there are performance cliffs that'd make it unsuitable).

If you considered mermaid while working on bear-note-graph, could you share the conclusions you came to?

I didn't check mermaid for bng, but had checked it before (I like visual representations of knowledge, no matter what they are for). Although I found it interesting, my gut feeling here was that if my problem's solution (at that point it was just out of curiosity) was going to be JS-based at some point, I should go directly for D3 (I already had experience, but not recent, with D3).

Mermaid uses D3 under the scenes, so depending on your specifics it could be the best solution anyway, though. Performance wise, I'd expect it to be OK (D3 is pretty fast in most cases) although if there are any issues down the road, fixing them from such a high level library as mermaid could be daunting (it's "easier" to move down from D3 to paper.js or g.js or any other high performance canvas renderer if the case arises).