“Everything is connected!” — Dirk Gently

Introduction

gently is a Rust port of Perl’s Graph::Easy: build graphs (nodes, edges, groups), lay them out deterministically on a flat surface, and render them as ASCII art, HTML, or Graphviz DOT — plus parse graphs from the Graph::Easy text format and from DOT.

Compatibility is gated differentially against the original Perl tool via a pinned oracle (Graph::Easy v0.69, just oracle-verify): an output only ships when it is byte-identical to what the oracle produces. Where gently still differs, the known hard cases page is the authoritative status.

Quickstart

Build the CLI and render a graph to ASCII art — the Graph::Easy text format goes in on stdin, the layout comes out:

cargo build -p gently-cli
echo '[ Bonn ] --> [ Berlin ] --> [ Hamburg ]' | target/debug/gently --as ascii

+------+     +--------+     +---------+
| Bonn | --> | Berlin | --> | Hamburg |
+------+     +--------+     +---------+

--as selects the output format (so does the output filename’s extension, as in upstream). Rendering from a file argument instead of stdin:

target/debug/gently --as ascii examples/simple-chain/input.gv

Formats

Asking for an unwired format (e.g. --as boxart, --as svg) errors with gently: unknown output format and exit 255 until a renderer is wired to the CLI.

Where to go next

• Examples — worked, byte-verified input/output pairs.
• Gallery — every example as ASCII art and SVG.
• Release status — version and commit this book was built from (generated; the repository is authoritative).
• The repository README carries the contributor gates and the full compatibility methodology.