I haven't created much ASCII art in my own code yet, but I've been VERY grateful to others who included it in a few of the legacy projects I've dealt with in th

I haven't created much ASCII art in my own code yet, but I've been VERY grateful to others who included it in a few of the legacy projects I've dealt with in the past. One project in particular was troubling. It was an industrial spray controller for vinyards and such. As is typical with these older products, the microcontroller that drove it was an 8051 (some SiLab part I think). Normally that wouldn't matter, but this project was written in assembly. Even worse, it was one big file (something like 17k lines). All of the main variables we're statically allocated for easier ram usage and eeprom saving. There were deliberately few functions in the program (almost everything was in the main loop), due to stack size limitations (it was a 23 byte stack I believe). I don't think a single macro was used in the entire project. Basically this was a very old and very crusty project. The comments were the only redeeming quality. Timing diagrams, menu layouts, waveforms, LCD illustrations, etc. There were whole PAGES of ASCII art, and it saved my butt. Thank you to whoever made the decision to properly comment that code. I owe you a few beers. EDIT: That's also around the same time I started using VS Code, which was a huge help. It beats the heck out of whatever 1990s-looking IDE they had me using to debug the project. You don't realize how nice it is to have proper search functionality and the ability to open a file in multiple frames until you don't have it anymore.