I use Monodraw[0]. Best purchase I ever made.

[0] https://monodraw.helftone.com/

Other similar tools are

- https://textpaint.com/

- https://web.archive.org/web/20210503172024/https://fatiherik...

- https://textik.com/

- https://asciiflow.com/#/

- https://fsymbols.com/draw/

Tip: look into setting the value of the `spellcheck` HTML attribute/property to `false` for your element labels -- I am looking at red wavy underlines under every "GND", "uF" etc, on the [linked] front page. Spell-checking is obviously practically useless since these labels aren't meant to be spell English (or otherwise) words, I imagine.

For a native macOS app, there is also Monodraw [1], which is great.

[1] https://monodraw.helftone.com

Oh nice, this is going in the tool belt. Simple and self-explanatory. Hits the same notes as excalidraw.

Only thing I couldn't figure out right away is how to copy the drawing itself (not the JSON data). Eventually I found cmd+shift+c in the keyboard shortcuts. Bit later I found 'Export Text' by clicking on the project name (default: 'Undefined').

I'd put that functionality a bit more front-and-center

> "I'm passionate about creating ASCII graphs ..."

I wonder if this guy is like me, around my age. I was around at the "beginning" of the world wide web, and I absolutely love 8-bit graphics, ASCII art, etc., the simpler the better; probably because it brings me back to the heyday, the wild west of the internet. I really miss those days. :-(

OFF TOPIC, but, on topic, I decided to goof with playscii yday. It is a powerful little thing, but will take some time for me to get comfortable.

"Playscii is an open source ASCII art and animation program. It runs on Windows, Linux, and macOS."

- https://jp.itch.io/playscii

- https://heptapod.host/jp-lebreton/playscii

Good little interview I found with the creator, JP LeBreton (legend, but I didn't know!)

https://cheesetalks.net/jplebreton.php

> As far as tooling limitations, GZDoom is not a bed of roses. Very little in the engine is runtime editable, so you have to reload the engine to see any of your changes. A rapid turnaround time for reloading changes is nice but it's far better to have as much as possible live-update. And ideally, in my opinion, you have the editor built into the engine itself, and you can do much of what you need from there without having to jump around to outside programs. Playscii was my first big attempt to build a little environment like that, something you can think in once you learn it well enough, like a musical instrument. Miles to go but that's always where I'm trying to get to.

Pedantic note to people using 'ASCII' in this thread (although Monosketch tool does't (EDIT actually does) claim to be ASCII). It uses e.g. "◎" U+25CE BULLSEYE which definitely isn't.

And the 'ascii-driven-development' blog post mentioned downthread even uses emojis.

I'd love some version of these tools that could reliably round-trip pure text. Some heuristic or model that can actually recognise boxes, lines with anchors, parent-child relationships etc, so you can paste in pure text and immediately start rearranging stuff. My experience with Monodraw was that you had to maintain the original file format to do this, so once a diagram was in a markdown file or whatever, you couldn't just cut and paste it and easily edit it. At that point it might as well be any file format rendered as an image.

Great app!

It clicked for me once I realized you can ctrl+shift+C to copy the diagram to text, and paste in my editor! But I wonder if it would be possible to make ctrl+C copy to clipboard as ASCII? I see that ctrl+C copies the json representation of the selected objects, but surely it would be possible to maintain an internal model of copied objects, while the clipboard is always filled with usable ASCII? I think I've seen some applications do this before

There’s also https://github.com/casparwylie/cascii-core.

I like it! I really like that the lines stick to the boxes but it's a bit hard to make them stick.

this is super cool as an art form but ASCII art is an accessibility nightmare so please don't use it for docs unless you know what you're doing and have made it accessible in some other way

Looks fab. Great design.

Can it make polygons? Basically, shapes other than rectangles? If so, how? (maybe I missed it?)

Hook up to svgbob[1] and bob is your uncle (pun intended).

[1] https://ivanceras.github.io/svgbob-editor/

https://github.com/jlongster/tigma there is also this

Very nice. It would be great to see this as an Obsidian plugin.

Laughed at the default text value. What track's that from?

This is really cool. Better than draw.io and excalidraw

I'm a huge fan of asciiflow, this is better!

Is it easy to write a renderer in another program? Do people still say lazyweb?

Seeing projects with first commits from 3-4 years ago feels like finding pre nuclear testing steel. No strong proof exists that this project was not conceived as slop.

Hate to be that guy, but ASCII doesn't contain box-drawing characters or arrows. I guess it's a lost cause though…

finally!

Nice project!

This pairs nicely with ASCII-Driven Development - for iterating and modifying layouts with AI.

https://medium.com/@calufa/ascii-driven-development-850f6666...