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what did you use to render these beautiful trees?

• bombcar 6y ago
  Agreed! I’ve not seen ascii art that beautiful on HN before.
• svat 6y ago
  To retrace my steps: I searched on google for [ascii tree generator] and, alongside many results about generating output for directory trees / folder structures (like that of tree: http://mama.indstate.edu/users/ice/tree/ http://mama.indstate.edu/users/ice/tree/), I found this "Show HN" submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21042390 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21042390 . I installed and tried the linked project (https://github.com/spandanb/ascii_tree https://github.com/spandanb/ascii_tree) and it kind of works, though I had several issues (posted later at https://github.com/spandanb/ascii_tree/issues/3 https://github.com/spandanb/ascii_tree/issues/3). So I gave up and just copied the tree from that thread's top comment, by user kps (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21043091 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21043091) and manually edited the tree in Emacs to add new nodes by copying things around. Additionally, after posting the comment to HN from desktop, I happened to notice within the 2-hour edit window that it looked awful on mobile (as does the comment I copied from: probably a bug with the default font stack used by Chrome on Android not using monospace versions of the box-drawing characters), so I edited to replace "─" with an ASCII "-". It looks less perfect on desktop, but less poorly aligned on mobile, so is a reasonable compromise.
  • mikevin 6y ago
    Thanks for explaining the steps you took. I'm always looking out for ways to approach unknown unknowns and this is a great help.