jr-b
commented
10 months ago Hey @HariSekhon,
I agree, --watch-mode would be great!
What I've been doing on my side to fix this small annoyance is using a small CLI tool called entr that allows to run arbitrary commands when it detects a file change (https://github.com/eradman/entr):
ls diagram.py | entr python diagram.py
You can then work on your diagram, save, and the output file will be generated/updated every time there's a change in the files listed by ls.
With both your code window and your output file opened side by side, you can have an interactive workflow.
D2 has an amazing feature where it can run as a foreground process that watches your diagram source code, runs a local webserver which automatically opens in your web browser and dynamically auto-updates the diagram in your browser page for every change (edit+save).
This makes development much easier and more interactive.
It's literally as simple as running this in D2:
Perhaps Python diagrams can do something similar to make iterative development more automated like this?
Before this I had a hotkey in my [.vimrc]() to execute the python file with diagrams configured to auto-open the resulting png but that seems a bit slow and poor by comparison now I started using D2's interactive mode...