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> I like doing things in plain text and I like ASCII art. However, this is tedious work, if you don't have the tooling to maintain these "diagrams", when things

> I like doing things in plain text and I like ASCII art. However, this is tedious work, if you don't have the tooling to maintain these "diagrams", when things change. Not having integrated built-in tools to properly maintain this type of representation is a missed opportunity. IDEs went the copy/paste and word replace route, and the few diagram and table drawing tools in ASCII are often in separate applications, reducing their usefulness.

comment500 4y ago
Maybe the universal solution to this is for the Unicode Consortium to dedicate a set of codepoints for encoding SVG or something similar. Then the system text renderer can be responsible for drawing these diagrams, and they can be embedded anywhere in text. It would also have the side benefit of letting people draw their own emojis, rather than waiting some time from months to never to have their suggestions included in the next Unicode release.
- rocqua 4y ago
  I beg you, do not give them ideas. Leave plaintext to be as plain as possible. Emoji were already a bad compromise made to get Japanese encodings to sort-of work. Leave markup to general markup languages. Don't make unicode even more convoluted.
chii 4y ago
a descent editor would have multi-cursor, multi-line edits that could be also configured to do 'inserts' over appends. So you'd use a mouse to "draw" a line (if it's horizontal or vertical), and it'd take only 4 "draw line" to make a box, and turn on 'insert' mode to type in the text inside the box. Drawing diagonal lines is a bit more involved, but not too hard either. Adding a cell to an ascii table is also pretty easy using this same method. However, it is preferable to have the diagram in svg tho. The svg file could even be separate from the comments, but just referenced.
shadowofneptune 4y ago
If we're already assuming an IDE, how about one that expands images which are linked in comments? It'd have minimal friction if everyone else on the team uses the IDE, and if someone does not, they can open the link instead. I cannot find any information about an IDE which does this.
- colejohnson66 4y ago
  HolyC (from TempleOS) allows non-text content to be placed directly inside source code, but no one (anymore) programs in it

comment500 4y ago

Maybe the universal solution to this is for the Unicode Consortium to dedicate a set of codepoints for encoding SVG or something similar. Then the system text renderer can be responsible for drawing these diagrams, and they can be embedded anywhere in text. It would also have the side benefit of letting people draw their own emojis, rather than waiting some time from months to never to have their suggestions included in the next Unicode release.

rocqua 4y ago
I beg you, do not give them ideas. Leave plaintext to be as plain as possible. Emoji were already a bad compromise made to get Japanese encodings to sort-of work. Leave markup to general markup languages. Don't make unicode even more convoluted.

chii 4y ago

a descent editor would have multi-cursor, multi-line edits that could be also configured to do 'inserts' over appends. So you'd use a mouse to "draw" a line (if it's horizontal or vertical), and it'd take only 4 "draw line" to make a box, and turn on 'insert' mode to type in the text inside the box. Drawing diagonal lines is a bit more involved, but not too hard either. Adding a cell to an ascii table is also pretty easy using this same method. However, it is preferable to have the diagram in svg tho. The svg file could even be separate from the comments, but just referenced.

shadowofneptune 4y ago

If we're already assuming an IDE, how about one that expands images which are linked in comments? It'd have minimal friction if everyone else on the team uses the IDE, and if someone does not, they can open the link instead. I cannot find any information about an IDE which does this.

colejohnson66 4y ago
HolyC (from TempleOS) allows non-text content to be placed directly inside source code, but no one (anymore) programs in it