Table of Contents

Output formats

Every ProjGraph command writes text to stdout. What that text is — a Mermaid diagram, an ASCII tree, or a fenced Markdown block — depends on the command, the --format flag, and whether you asked for a file. This page explains the choices so you can pick one deliberately.

The three renderings

Rendering Available on Shows Renders as a picture in
mermaid visualize, and always for erd / classdiagram The whole graph, as diagram source GitHub, GitLab, this site, VS Code
tree visualize Each root expanded recursively through its whole chain Nowhere — it is already the picture
flat visualize Every project once, with its direct references only Nowhere — it is already the picture

erd and classdiagram have no --format flag. Both always emit Mermaid, because an entity relationship diagram and a class diagram have no useful plain-text form.

Choosing between them

tree and flat answer different questions, and the difference is not cosmetic.

Tracing what a project pulls in transitively? Use tree. It starts from the projects nothing else references and expands each chain to its full depth. A project that appears more than once is expanded on first sight and marked (see above) afterwards, so the output stays finite:

projgraph visualize ./MySolution.slnx --format tree

🧪 ProjGraph.Tests.Contract
└── ProjGraph.Mcp
    └── ProjGraph.Lib
        ├── ProjGraph.Lib.ClassDiagram
        │   └── ProjGraph.Lib.Core
        │       └── ProjGraph.Core
        └── ProjGraph.Lib.Dependencies
            └── ProjGraph.Lib.Core (see above)

Auditing what each project references directly? Use flat. Every project is listed exactly once, grouped by type, with only its immediate references. No chain is followed, so nothing is repeated and nothing is elided:

projgraph visualize ./MySolution.slnx --format flat

🔷 ProjGraph.Lib
├── → ProjGraph.Lib.ClassDiagram
├── → ProjGraph.Lib.Dependencies
└── → ProjGraph.Lib.EntityFramework
🔷 ProjGraph.Lib.ClassDiagram
└── → ProjGraph.Lib.Core

Committing to docs? Use mermaid, which is the default for visualize:

projgraph visualize ./MySolution.slnx

The emoji mark the project type: 🔷 library, 🚀 executable, 🧪 test project.

Fenced or raw: what --output changes

This is the part that surprises people. The same command produces two different things depending on where it is going:

  • To stdout, Mermaid arrives wrapped in a mermaid code fence, so you can paste it straight into a Markdown file and have it render.
  • To a file via --output, the extension decides. Only .mmd suppresses the fence — a .mmd file is already understood to contain nothing but a diagram. Every other extension, .md included, keeps it.
# Fenced Markdown, ready to commit into a docs page
projgraph visualize ./MySolution.slnx --output docs/dependencies.md

# Raw Mermaid, for a tool that parses .mmd directly
projgraph visualize ./MySolution.slnx --output docs/dependencies.mmd

Prefer --output over a shell redirect. It creates missing directories for you, and it is what selects the right fencing.

Piping the output

mermaid keeps stdout clean: progress messages go to stderr, so a redirect captures the diagram and nothing else.

tree and flat are written for a human at a terminal, and their progress header goes to stdout along with the graph. If you redirect them, that header lands in your file too. Use --output, which writes the rendered graph and leaves the progress message on the terminal where it belongs:

# Captures the header as well - probably not what you want
projgraph visualize ./MySolution.slnx --format tree > deps.txt

# Captures the graph, with its title block
projgraph visualize ./MySolution.slnx --format tree --output deps.txt

The diagram's own title block is part of the render, so it is written to the file either way. Drop it with --show-title false.

Titles

Every diagram carries a title block naming what was analysed. Drop it when you are embedding the diagram under a heading that already says the same thing:

projgraph erd ./Data/LibraryContext.cs --show-title false

--show-title is available on visualize, erd, and classdiagram.

What stats does instead

stats is the exception: it reports numbers, not a graph, so it has no --format and no --output. It prints a formatted table to the terminal and nothing else.

projgraph stats ./MySolution.slnx --top 10

Rendering Mermaid on this site

The showcase pages embed their Mermaid output directly, so you can see exactly what each command produces without running it. That is the same text the CLI writes — the pages are regenerated from the tool whenever it changes.

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