Plain Text Diagram - Syntax Highlighting

Syntax highlighting for .ptd Plain Text Diagrams files.

See the official Plain Text Diagrams blog post for information on PT Diagrams and the official syntax.

See below for an example of a class diagram and a sequence diagram in PT Diagrams format.

What are PT Diagrams?

PT Diagrams is a simple text notation for creating text 'diagrams' - they aren't really diagrams but are nested, indented text files that can be rapidly parsed by the human eye to gain a high level understanding of a software system.

Structural: For example classes and files are listed with their data and behaviour - try to see them as boxes. Some class relationships are indicated with arrows.

Behavioural: Sequence 'diagrams' are constructed via an indented pseudo code format. Function calls are shown with arrows, return types are shown with <, and work well to indicate the flow of a use case scenario.

Screenshot Plain Text class 'diagram' and sequence 'diagrams'

Installation

Visit https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=wware.plain-text-diagrams
Or search for wware or plain-text-diagrams inside vscode extensions.

Then just open a file with a .ptd or .pt-diagram extension.

Features

Syntax highlighting and folding for .ptd files.

Format your .ptd files with OPT+SHIFT+F.

Requirements

Just open a file with a .ptd or .pt-diagram extension.

Extension Settings

None

Known Issues

Some aspects of the syntax highlighting could be improved, like expressions.

Highlighting of brackets inside text descriptions is not perfect. This is because the vscode setting

editor.bracketPairColorization.enabled

is causing yellow bracket highlighting despite my grammar. In other words, its not the fault of the grammar, but the fault of the vscode setting.

Solution is to disable bracket pair colorization in your settings.json:

"[ptd]": {
    "editor.bracketPairColorization.enabled": false
}

Release Notes

See CHANGELOG.md

PT Diagrams Syntax