terminal-diagrams

Terminal Diagrams

Draw any diagram shape as plain monospace text — no external renderer, no Mermaid, no Artifact call. This is reference material: read it directly when a structural answer (architecture, flow, hierarchy, comparison) would be clearer as a diagram than prose alone — the trigger heuristic lives in system/rules/work-preferences.md §Terminal diagrams.

Not a closed list of diagram "types." Every diagram below is the same handful of primitives composed differently — learn the primitives, then compose whatever shape the answer needs.

Primitives

Boxes and lines (Unicode box-drawing — matches the vocabulary already established in display-themes.md's tree connectors):

┌─────────┐   corners: ┌ ┐ └ ┘     lines: ─ (horizontal) │ (vertical)
│  node   │   tree connectors: ├── └── │   (reuse display-themes.md exactly)
└─────────┘

Arrows and connectors:

→ ←  ↓ ↑     sync / direct flow
⇢ ⇠          async / eventual (dotted-in-spirit; Unicode has no dashed arrow, use ⇢)
├──          branch point (tree, decision fan-out)

Alignment rules (non-negotiable — a misaligned diagram is worse than none):

• Fixed-width monospace only. Count visual width, not byte/char count — wide glyphs (most emoji, some box-drawing corners) can render 2-cells wide in a terminal; when in doubt, stick to the plain single-width set above and verify by eyeballing column alignment before sending.
• Keep total width reasonable for a terminal pane — wrap or restructure past ~80-100 columns rather than letting a line run long and reflow.
• Label every node and every edge that isn't obvious from position alone.

Worked examples

These four are the styles most explanations need — not the only ones the primitives support (see Composing other shapes below).

1. Flow / pipeline

┌─────────┐      ┌─────────┐      ┌─────────┐
│  LOAD    │ ───→ │ CLASSIFY │ ───→ │  BUILD   │
└─────────┘      └─────────┘      └─────────┘

Branching flow (decision point):