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Original source1 min read

Mermaid to Unicode box art (grok-mermaid)

Summary

Simon Willison discovered a Rust-based Mermaid terminal renderer in the Grok CLI codebase and ported it to the browser via WebAssembly, creating an online tool.

Mermaid to Unicode box art (grok-mermaid)
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Tool: Mermaid to Unicode box art (grok-mermaid)

Simon Willison’s Weblog

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16th July 2026

Tool

Mermaid to Unicode box art (grok-mermaid)

While exploring the codebase for the newly open-sourced Grok CLI coding agent I came across xai-grok-markdown/src/mermaid.rs, a "self-contained terminal renderer for Mermaid diagrams" written in Rust.

I figured it would be fun to try that out in a browser via WebAssembly. Here's the prompt I ran in Claude Code for web (Fable 5), and this is what the resulting tool looks like:

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This is a beat by Simon Willison, posted on 16th July 2026.

tools 69

rust 111

webassembly 127

mermaid 3

grok 14

xai 13

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Key points and analysis

Article intelligence

EngineersIntermediate

Key points

  • Discovered Rust terminal renderer for Mermaid in Grok CLI codebase
  • Ported it to browser using WebAssembly
  • Created an online tool to edit and render Mermaid diagrams

Highlights and analysis are generated automatically and may contain errors. Check the original source.