Transitrix Studio

Diagrams as text, in your editor. Write a diagram in a plain YAML file, and Transitrix Studio renders it live, right beside your code. No drag-and-drop canvas, no proprietary file format — just text you can diff, review in a pull request, and hand to an AI that reads it natively.

Why text-native diagrams?

Diagrams hidden in proprietary binary files don't survive contact with version control. They are hard to diff, hard to review, hard to merge. They drift from the truth they once described.

Transitrix flips that:

• The diagram lives in a YAML file — readable in any editor, diffable in git, reviewable in pull requests.
• The picture is derived, not authored — edit the text, save, and the diagram updates itself. Never out of sync.
• AI works with it natively — your assistant can read, edit, and reason about the diagram's source without a plugin or export step.
• Built on open standards — ArchiMate 3.2, BPMN 2.0, CMM. Your files aren't locked to this extension.

17 notations, one extension

Every preview ships with a toolbar: title toggle, discrete zoom (50–200%), save as SVG, save as PNG (2× for crisp output), and copy PNG to clipboard (Windows today; macOS / Linux planned).

The preview opens automatically when a recognised file becomes the active editor, and refreshes on save — not on every keystroke. That's deliberate: re-rendering mid-edit would burn CPU and flash parse errors on every intermediate state of a structural change. It also means an edit with no save behind it looks, at a glance, like a broken preview — the toolbar's small "as of last save" label is the tell that nothing's wrong, the file just hasn't been saved yet.

For an edit-and-watch-it-update feel without an explicit save keystroke, turn on autosave with a short delay:

{
  "files.autoSave": "afterDelay",
  "files.autoSaveDelay": 500
}

Turn auto-open off with transitrix.preview.autoOpenOnFileOpen if you'd rather open previews on demand — the toolbar preview icon (same $(graph) icon across every notation) always works regardless of the setting.

Pairs well with Mermaid

Transitrix and Mermaid are complementary, not competing. Use Mermaid for general-purpose diagrams — flowcharts, sequence diagrams, ER, Gantt. Use Transitrix for the structured enterprise notations Mermaid doesn't cover. Together: nearly 30 notations at your fingertips, both free and open source.

Get started in 3 steps

1. Install this extension — search for Transitrix Studio in the Extensions panel of VS Code, Cursor, VSCodium, or Windsurf.

2. Create a file ending in one of the recognised suffixes, e.g. app.blocks.transitrix.yaml:

   notation: blocks
   nested_blocks:
     id: BLOCKS-DEMO-1
     name: "My app"
     blocks:
       - { id: FRONTEND, name: "Frontend" }
       - { id: BACKEND, name: "Backend" }
   

3. Save it. The preview panel opens automatically beside the file and shows two connected boxes, "Frontend" and "Backend", inside a "My app" container — and re-renders on every save from then on.

Every notation in the table above follows the same pattern: *.<notation>.transitrix.yaml in, live diagram out. Recognised suffixes are configurable in Settings → Transitrix Studio.

Editors: the extension ships to the VS Code Marketplace (VS Code) and to the Open VSX Registry (Cursor, VSCodium, Windsurf). The artefact is identical; pick whichever Extensions panel ships with your editor. JetBrains IDEs (IntelliJ IDEA and the rest) have a companion Transitrix Studio plugin — install it from Settings → Plugins → Marketplace and search for Transitrix Studio.

Creating a new element

In a repository that follows the Transitrix methodology, the Command Palette carries Transitrix: New Goal Element and the matching Driver, Constraint and Requirement commands. Each asks only for what carries the element's own meaning — its id, its name, the one field its type requires — and writes the file into the folder that type belongs in.

Everything else the file needs is computed rather than typed: the zone, the admission record (who admitted it, when, and the result of the checks that actually ran), and the lifecycle dates. Two of those values are yours to set rather than accept:

The command refuses to write a file whose id already exists, or whose references do not resolve, rather than recording a check as passed when it did not.

The same defaults, and the equivalent --author / --valid-from flags, are available from the CLI's transitrix new and transitrix validate --fix — see docs/cli.md.

Settings

Configure under Settings → Transitrix Studio. The canonical keys are transitrix.*.

Doing this for a whole system, not one diagram?

Studio renders one file at a time — no repository, no setup beyond installing it. If you want to model an entire organization's goals, processes, and capabilities as one connected, version-controlled model instead of separate diagrams, that's a different job with its own quick start: set up an architecture repository →

Learn more

• 🌐 Site — transitrix.com
• 🧰 Source & issues — github.com/transitrix/transitrix-studio
• 📚 Glossary — see glossary.md in the repo root for the notation terms used above

Open source. MIT licensed. Built by Valerii Korobeinikov.