5 ms·

This is cool, but why would I want to draw diagrams like this? There's a plethora of tools out there that make drawing diagrams pretty simple, why do I want to

by jbob2000 9y ago

This is cool, but why would I want to draw diagrams like this? There's a plethora of tools out there that make drawing diagrams pretty simple, why do I want to do it with text? I'd drive myself crazy - every time you change one character in the diagram, you have to shift all the other characters on the line. I don't mean to be condescending, but.. whyyy? It just seems so fragile to be doing complex diagrams in plain text like that.

scardine 9y ago
While ascii art is not easy to edit (it is simple enough for many uses) it shares all other advantages of readable plain text formats. I loved it.
- gravypod 9y ago
  If you made a Spongedown vi/emacs/nano editor that had paint-like features (place speech bubble, place resistor, place trace, place line, etc) then this would become practical.
  - teddyh 9y ago
    Emacs: M-x artist-mode Shift-MouseButton2, select Drawing → Rectangle
Jach 9y ago
http://asciiflow.com/ http://asciiflow.com/ is invaluable for some pretty quick ASCII diagramming that I can paste into source code or chat or wherever later. But I like that they don't have a billion charting components, it keeps things simple, and if I want it to actually look nice for a presentation or long-living documentation I'm going to use a real charting/diagramming tool... svgbob is neat but I can't imagine a situation where I'd want an ASCII circuit diagram vs a shot of one from a tool like Eagle.
ivanceras 9y ago
This is inspired by my first project when I was still a student(2002's). One of my professor wanted to have an application that does a question and answer test for his electric/electronic class. He wanted to fit on a floppy disk, and can be distributed to all of his students. The questionnaires was then encoded in plain text and I made a parser to go through each of the questions and their corresponding choices/answer. I skipped on questions that has diagrams and figures, since the program will only run on the terminal and I don't know any simple document formats at that time.
fimdomeio 9y ago
I do ascii diagrams all the time. I use Monodraw for that. From a design point of view the restrictions it imposes also create a consistent look and feel. Everything is aligned to a grid, boxes arrows, text. I never lose any time trying to make things look good as I would with another tool. Also there's the added bonus that since I'm the only one using it amongst the people I work with. When anyone sees it they know... it's a technical drawing from that guy.
yoz-y 9y ago
I could understand this as an interchange format. However for it to be really useful it should be accompanied by a GUI tool that allows you to only draw diagrams which are unambiguously representable as ASCII. Then you could use the tool to draw comfortably and only use the text as an evergreen format.

scardine 9y ago

While ascii art is not easy to edit (it is simple enough for many uses) it shares all other advantages of readable plain text formats. I loved it.

gravypod 9y ago
If you made a Spongedown vi/emacs/nano editor that had paint-like features (place speech bubble, place resistor, place trace, place line, etc) then this would become practical.
- teddyh 9y ago
  Emacs: M-x artist-mode Shift-MouseButton2, select Drawing → Rectangle

Jach 9y ago

http://asciiflow.com/ http://asciiflow.com/ is invaluable for some pretty quick ASCII diagramming that I can paste into source code or chat or wherever later. But I like that they don't have a billion charting components, it keeps things simple, and if I want it to actually look nice for a presentation or long-living documentation I'm going to use a real charting/diagramming tool... svgbob is neat but I can't imagine a situation where I'd want an ASCII circuit diagram vs a shot of one from a tool like Eagle.

ivanceras 9y ago

This is inspired by my first project when I was still a student(2002's). One of my professor wanted to have an application that does a question and answer test for his electric/electronic class. He wanted to fit on a floppy disk, and can be distributed to all of his students. The questionnaires was then encoded in plain text and I made a parser to go through each of the questions and their corresponding choices/answer. I skipped on questions that has diagrams and figures, since the program will only run on the terminal and I don't know any simple document formats at that time.

fimdomeio 9y ago

I do ascii diagrams all the time. I use Monodraw for that. From a design point of view the restrictions it imposes also create a consistent look and feel. Everything is aligned to a grid, boxes arrows, text. I never lose any time trying to make things look good as I would with another tool. Also there's the added bonus that since I'm the only one using it amongst the people I work with. When anyone sees it they know... it's a technical drawing from that guy.

yoz-y 9y ago

I could understand this as an interchange format. However for it to be really useful it should be accompanied by a GUI tool that allows you to only draw diagrams which are unambiguously representable as ASCII. Then you could use the tool to draw comfortably and only use the text as an evergreen format.