Just join the #mermaid channel and request to join. Communication for the alpha test group will take place in the #mermaid-alpha private channel.
The first alpha release will be made available to testers sometime next week.
The expectation for testers is active participation in providing feedback and creating feature requests or bug reports.
As I mentioned in the original thread, the plan is for a freemium-type offering on release though whether that’s one closed-source freemium-licensed plugin vs two separate/complementary plugins, one closed and one open is still not 100% decided. I’m leaning towards diagram preview and export related features being FOSS, while making highlighting and code intelligence features (inspections, completions, folding, etc.) being paid (though with ~25 diagram types, there’s some leeway to play around with making some of them available in the free version).
Semantic syntax highlighting, robust parsing and contextual code intelligence are powered by proprietary Grammar-Kit parsers – one for each of the 22 supported diagram types.
The feature list is large, but some of the notable ones are:
80+ inspections including and a number of quick fixes
Rich support for Iconify icon sets (including custom repositories and file imports)
Diagram Export
(SVG/PNG) and Print capabilities (print-optimized PNG + system print dialog)
Sync artifacts on save (keeps your PNG/SVG artifacts in sync with the diagram source code)
Live preview, Mermaid-in-Markdown (both language support and live preview)
Rich contextual completions for the vast majority of supported diagram types
Formatters for 10 diagram types so far
MCP Tools for:
Rendering diagrams (SVG/PNG)
Analyzing diagrams for issues using both the IDE-based analysis (parsing + inspections) and Mermaid.js
Searching for available icons in your installed icon sets
The rendering pipelines for all use-cases use IntelliJ’s bundled JCEF dependency, so there’s no call out to a separate browser dependency to render the diagrams.
I’m continuing to refine support for each diagram type and have a roadmap of exciting features I can’t wait to implement!
On a related note, the recent release of Nereid has me wondering if there’s still a need for the additional limited OSS offering I was considering? I haven’t tried the plugin myself, so I can’t really speak to its quality/potential as a community baseline offering though it is licensed under GPL v3, which might be an issue for some.
