About

Nuxtgram started as a build step. We kept a folder of architecture diagrams drawn in a graphical editor, and every one of them was wrong within a quarter. Nobody wanted to open a design tool to move one box, so the diagrams quietly stopped matching the systems they described.

Text definitions fixed the social problem more than the technical one. A diagram that is six lines in a repository gets corrected in the same pull request as the code, by whoever noticed. That only works if rendering is boring: no service to be down, no account to share, no output that changes when nothing changed.

What it deliberately does not do

No hosted rendering

There is no upload form and no rendering API on this host. The tool runs on the machine that holds the definitions.

No layout hints

You cannot pin a node to a coordinate. Manual positioning is how diagrams become unmaintainable again; if the automatic layout is wrong, that is a bug worth reporting.

No embedded fonts or scripts

Output SVGs reference nothing external. They are larger than they could be and they render everywhere, which is the trade we wanted.

No theming system

Two themes, light and dark, both fixed. Colour is used for line style and grouping, never as the only carrier of meaning.

Maintenance

This is a small tool maintained alongside other infrastructure work, not a product with a roadmap. Releases happen when something is broken or when a diagram we needed could not be expressed. The grammar has been stable for some time and breaking changes to it are avoided; the command-line flags are less settled.

The three diagram families cover what we actually draw. Requests for mind maps, entity-relationship diagrams, Gantt charts, and flowcharts come up regularly and have all been declined — each one needs a different layout engine, and other tools already do them well.

Name

From diagram, with the prefix carried over from the internal build tool this grew out of. The tool itself was retired years ago; the folder name outlived it and eventually became the name of this.