27 ms·

Monodraw

605 points by mafro 1y ago

jonpalmisc 1y ago
Monodraw is great. If I could change one thing, I would make it more expensive. $10 feels like a steal, given the use I've gotten out of it.
yeliu84 1y ago
The price is so good for such an amazing app. I'm in!
dickiedyce 1y ago
It's a really cracking little app, and great for inline docs.
ryanmarsh 1y ago
I really needed this 20 years ago.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
thomascgalvin 1y ago
I use Mermaid and such for a lot of technical documentation, but this seems like it's going to be much more straightforward, especially for quick and one-off diagrams. Very nice.
larodi 1y ago
This at least 10th post of Monodraw on hn https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8433417 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8433417 - oct 09 2014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9545252 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9545252 - may 14 2015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27832910 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27832910 - july 14 2021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32134469 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32134469 - july 18 2022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39651796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39651796 - march 9 2024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45037904 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45037904 - 1 year ago and the some all of these gained interest, so my conclusion is Monodraw benefits a lot from being regularly exposed to HN crowd.
- danmur 1y ago
  It's very effective. Both times I've wanted to give them my money. But mac only, geeze
  - tracker1 1y ago
    In the same boat myself... would be nice if they'd develop a more portable version... that said, could probably make an extension for VS Code or Zed to do similar.
- codazoda 1y ago
  It's also allowed. This is my first exposure to it, despite being a regular. Looks like a cool app.
  - inanutshellus 1y ago
    "If I haven't seen it, it's new to me!" feels apropos... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4nTu0ldFvQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4nTu0ldFvQ
    - Glant 1y ago
      One of today's lucky 10,000. https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
  - larodi 1y ago
    My point being that it is a very neat way to now-and-then onboard some new users. Wonder if those submitting thew 'news' are in any way affiliated, or perhaps - from the team.
    - milen 1y ago
      The team is just me - the developer. There’s no affiliation whatsoever, I’m actually quite surprised every time Monodraw appears on the front page as the app just had its 10th birthday. I would have assumed most people in the community would know about it by now.
auggierose 1y ago
Really cool, and so sad at the same time.
j1000 1y ago
Wow, this is cool
stevage 1y ago
>Because it's all just text Hiding a lot of complications in that phrase. What text encoding? What font? etc.
__bb 1y ago
This app is great for writing code comments when you hit one of those “1000 words or 1 picture” cases for an explanation of something. Just checked and my most recent document is a diagram of data flows between two services. Highly recommended.
shadowgovt 1y ago
Once again, the tool that I really want to see on Linux is available on... MacOSX. (I wonder if there is a Linux alternative? Closest thing I use is the drawing mode in emacs).
- icecheese 1y ago
  You might try Durdraw. Not exactly the same as Monodraw, but it does color, utf8, animation, mouse drawing, etc, and runs in the terminal.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
progforlyfe 1y ago
sign. Another macOS-only tool. Yawn
waynecochran 1y ago
This is fantastic. If I can integrate it into an IDE for commenting my programs that would be next level.!
J_Shelby_J 1y ago
Can LLMs understand ascii drawings? Or produce them? I’m trying to figure out a way to organize thoughts with charts in a way that provides useful context to an LLM and also that an LLM could theoretically generate.
- nemomarx 1y ago
  I wonder how tokenizing ASCII would work - although you could try ocr?
dunsany 1y ago
Own it, love it... corporate standard is Lucidchart but prefer Monodraw.
kotsmanis 1y ago
I have given you my money and haven’t regretted it. Nice app!
docandrew 1y ago
My favorite diagramming tool hands-down! It’s the only one that’s ever “clicked” for me, I use it all the time.
psim1 1y ago
Reminiscent of TheDraw (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheDraw https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheDraw), a tool I used "back in the day" to create BBS artwork.
mustaphah 1y ago
Monodraw supports PNG, SVG, and ASCII. Truly universal… unless your universe happens to run Linux
durandal1 1y ago
Long time user of Monodraw, such a delightful app. My main use case is to draw view hierarchies, tables and diagrams in source comments.
cryptos 1y ago
Great idea, but sadly only for macOS :-(
kenanfyi 1y ago
One of the coolest apps I miss after switching to Linux. I still boot my Mac to create diagrams with it every now and then.
endymion-light 1y ago
Will love to buy this once I get my Mac. Looks great, and also love the perpetual license for $9.99 rather than the host of subscription services, i'll probably end up buying it just to support good practices.
- JKCalhoun 1y ago
  That's cool … but we're calling buying an app licensing it now? That word is a red flag for me — wondering what dark pattern is awaiting, finding myself digging for the fine print…
  - endymion-light 1y ago
    true - it does say personal license, maybe there's some little print that says we own your entire project if it makes over $100
  - milen 1y ago
    At least back in the day, it used to be common to "buy a license" or "buy a serial key". I didn't really put too much thought into the phrasing, as I haven't received any feedback. Regardless, when you buy it, it's yours forever - no activation, no DRM, no subscription, no fine print. (Monodraw developer here).
  - quesera 1y ago
    Maybe just semantics? I think "license" is more technically correct. Even in the best consumer case, you are only "buying" a perpetual right to use a software product. Optionally, you might also get updates. In the US, the First-Sale Doctrine won't apply to software (unlike tangible books and records) so you probably do not have the right to sell your copy of this software to another person. Since that's not true ownership, I think it can only be described as a license. But I'll agree that all sorts of shenanigans can, and often do, hide under that generic term. However, "buy" could suggest many substantial rights that are not on offer (most importantly distribution), so it's a bit of a quandary. The phrase "Buy Now - $9.99, yours forever" might thread the needle. The sale page would still need to include all the legal terms, of course. I think "license" is a necessary word there.
LandR 1y ago
Mac only ?
- mrzool 1y ago
  Yes. Always nice to see good, Electron-free native apps for Mac.
NeutralForest 1y ago
Good occasion to mention a super nice ASCII/UTF drawing library for Emacs: https://github.com/tbanel/uniline https://github.com/tbanel/uniline
- JohnKemeny 1y ago
  Emacs has an artist-mode, you know.
  - NeutralForest 1y ago
    I know! But this is way different since it aligns everything properly and can be used in tandem with artist mode, you should try it out!
mrzool 1y ago
Such an underrated app. I’ve used it for everything from network topologies and storage diagrams and even for my kitchen redesign. Works way better than every pricey specialized tool I’ve tried, and the ASCII outputs look way cooler with their old-school hacker ASCII aesthetic! Highly recommended.
mafro 1y ago
Latest release Apr 2025 introduced a plain text save file format, which plays nicer for source control. Great to see development is still active.
elashri 1y ago
It seems very good, is there anything comparable for Linux?
- aaronius 1y ago
  Not sure how comparable they are since I never used Monodraw due to not running MACs, but there is https://asciiflow.com/ https://asciiflow.com/ and https://monosketch.io/ https://monosketch.io/ which I usually use. The latter is using some advanced UTF8 characters and when trying to get it incorporated for my personal blog, I had to use their specific monospaced font from their repo, as otherwise lines wouldn't line up correctly.
thevinchi 1y ago
I’m a big fan of durdraw[1] for crafting ANSI/ASCII art in the terminal, but this takes it to a whole new level, excited to try this especially if it includes color? From the website examples it doesn’t appear to include a color palette, but if it does then game on! [1] https://github.com/cmang/durdraw https://github.com/cmang/durdraw
nikolayasdf123 1y ago
10 USD? how does this compare to asciiflow.com which is free and open-source?
- fscaramuzza 1y ago
  or even the "export to ascii" of draw.io? I would be happy to hear what the advantages could be.
  - ostacke 1y ago
    How do you export to ascii in draw.io?
- abm53 1y ago
  The most obvious difference (and one worth much more than $10 to me) is that one is native and the other is not.
- milen 1y ago
  Monodraw's main selling point is that it's a fully native AppKit macOS app. If you value the experience, then you might like the app. asciiflow.com is great as well. (Monodraw developer here)
milen 1y ago
Developer of the app here, happy to answer any questions.
- hiltmon 1y ago
  Huge fan of the product, just wanted to say Thank You :)
  - milen 1y ago
    Appreciated!
- coxley 1y ago
  Are there any enhancements that you've wanted to do, but haven't had the time? I'm a huge fan, and am surprised how stable Monodraw has been for me. I've kept a single, growing document open as a scratch pad for the last three years. The only downtime was converting it to the new-ish file format haha.
  - milen 1y ago
    The top two features I want to add next are table support and some form of auto layout (like flexbox). I really care about stability and performance, so I’m happy to hear that it’s being appreciated.
    - dboon 1y ago
      There’s this layout library in C called clay which is basically a renderer agnostic flex box style layout engine. You might be interested in reading its source!
      - milen 1y ago
        Yeah, there's a few such libraries that I'm aware of but I haven't had time to evaluate them. I do plan to at least look into them and make decision from there.
billyp-rva 1y ago
Accessibility question: how do screen readers handle ascii art-style diagrams like this? It seems like they would be overwhelmed by the lines.
- jen729w 1y ago
  They don’t. You should aria-label it thus: role="img" aria-label="A styled box using monospace box-drawing characters. Its header is 'area complete', and there's a link to a forum post." (Happy to be corrected/updated here, I am not an a11y expert. I am a very happy Monodraw customer though!)
  - billyp-rva 1y ago
    Would this tell the screen reader to just ignore it? Then you'd lose all accessibility for its content.
    - jen729w 1y ago
      I believe role=“img” tells it to behave like one, causing the descriptive text to be read out in its place.
      - billyp-rva 1y ago
        Yeah, that seems bad. The whole point of the diagram was to explain something better than prose could, and now it is lost. I'm thinking the case were someone can make out the shapes/arrows/colors well, but not the text.
        jen729w 1y ago
        In my case, that's not why I'm using the diagram. It's simply a visual thing, to break up a page of text. Purely aesthetic.
    - cestith 1y ago
      The aria-label would be used to describe the content.
randomgermanguy 1y ago
Bought this couple months ago, and am now always looking for more ways to include this for inline-documentation. the fact i can export to clipboard and re-import it and reconstruct all the shapes etc. almost flawlessly is such a big win.
- sorentwo 1y ago
  Absolutely love monodraw for diagrams in documentation! All of the diagrams for Oban and Oban Pro are done this way: Job Lifecycle: https://hexdocs.pm/oban/job_lifecycle.html https://hexdocs.pm/oban/job_lifecycle.html Composition: https://oban.pro/docs/pro/1.6.4/composition.html https://oban.pro/docs/pro/1.6.4/composition.html
  - marceldegraaf 1y ago
    Sidenote: thanks so much for taking the time to write the Oban docs. I'm a big user (and fan) of Oban, and the docs are fantastic.
- avinassh 1y ago
  > am now always looking for more ways to include this for inline-documentation. same lol. here is a blog post of mine where I used them - https://avi.im/blag/2024/disaggregated-storage https://avi.im/blag/2024/disaggregated-storage I had to convert them to images because I couldn't get to working with Hugo, static site generator
- Etheryte 1y ago
  On one hand, this could provide a lot of value as some things are just plain hard to explain using only words. On the other hand, aren't you worried about when someone else comes along and needs to update one of those comments? If they're not aware of this tool, it's either going to be incredibly tedious or simply not going to happen.
  - randomgermanguy 1y ago
    As the other commenters put it, i dont think this is a huge issue. I usually use this for architecture level diagrams, and that shouldn't change often/at-all. In-case it does change, doing a new diagram is perfectly in-scope of whoevers working on that.
bayindirh 1y ago
I'm using this app since its first release. It's a great simple app I use for inline comment diagrams and more importantly server login banners. I love to login to a server with a customized banner and a tagline. It's just a small joy makes work more fun.
saltserv 1y ago
[dead]
noosphr 1y ago
Being able to include diagrams of what code is doing _inline_ is something that is vastly over looked by the majority of developers. It's one of the better parts of literate programming without typesetting.
- inanutshellus 1y ago
  I was struggling to come up with "worth it" ASCII-art-in-code scenarios for my codebase and found a post[1] with examples (that turns out to have been posted here in HN a while back[2]). Pretty cool. [1] https://blog.regehr.org/archives/1653 https://blog.regehr.org/archives/1653 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31891226 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31891226
pjmlp 1y ago
Now, that is something really cool, pity we didn't had something like that on BBS days.
- myvoiceismypass 1y ago
  I could have sworn I was using a tool called AcidDraw 30 years ago to design ascii bbbs login screens for use on Renegade systems.
- arghgh 1y ago
  Antique furniture meant something- it was done by hand. Same with ASCii- you could respect that it took some time to make it. What respect and feeling will there be for work in the future? Everything generated or thought cheaply generated on whims. Everything throwaway.
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    Unfortunely the work in the future will be mostly done by our AI overloards.
  - soulofmischief 1y ago
    Antique furniture is nice because it looks pretty and uses sturdy materials. I don't buy it for the pleasure of knowing how many hours, days or weeks a person slaved over it in order to pay rent. Good art is good art. Focusing on the time spent making it is a poor substitution for the ability to critique the art itself. Anyway, people made this same argument when image editors came into their own. There is a long, tiresome generational tradition of artists thinking the new crowd has it too easy and doesn't appreciate the grit that goes into making art in earlier mediums. We can do better.
diegobit 1y ago
Seems really cool and the price is fair! I'm gonna try it!
smusamashah 1y ago
Some relevant browser based ascii-drawing tools. https://app.monosketch.io/ https://app.monosketch.io/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210503172024/https://fatiherikli.github.io/archetype/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210503172024/https://fatiherik... https://textik.com/# https://textik.com/# https://asciiflow.com/#/ https://asciiflow.com/#/ https://fsymbols.com/draw/ https://fsymbols.com/draw/
- agentultra 1y ago
  Don’t forget emacs. It has artist-mode.
  - hardwaresofton 1y ago
    TIL: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ArtistMode https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ArtistMode
  - merelysounds 1y ago
    Vim’s modal editing, sans plugins, works surprisingly well for drawing too. Visual block mode is also helpful. At least in my experience, I built a puzzle game with pixel art elements[1] and I drew the initial puzzles in vim. [1]: https://apps.apple.com/app/nonoverse-nonogram-puzzles/id6748441182 https://apps.apple.com/app/nonoverse-nonogram-puzzles/id6748...
- tracker1 1y ago
  https://github.com/cwensley/pablodraw https://github.com/cwensley/pablodraw https://alternativeto.net/software/monodraw/ https://alternativeto.net/software/monodraw/
youcefb 1y ago
reminds me of https://github.com/casparwylie/cascii-core https://github.com/casparwylie/cascii-core
DavidPiper 1y ago
Haven't so quickly gone from "woah, that's cool" to "purchase now" in a long time. This is awesome and I will use it daily. There's a visual simplicity and legibility to the kind of straight-forward but slightly-decorated diagrams shown in the sample images. And the fact that I can now copy-paste them anywhere as well (rather than the classic "screenshot of a Miro or Paint.js board") is so cool.
ricokatayama 1y ago
That’s great. You gained a new customer. In the prompt's and Caves of Qud 1.0 era, I'd say ASCII art is a must, both in terms of UX and aesthetic in general.
MrGilbert 1y ago
While not exactly the same use case, I'd also like to point to REXPaint [1]. Same same, but different. And Windows only, though Wine might help under Linux. [1] https://www.gridsagegames.com/rexpaint/ https://www.gridsagegames.com/rexpaint/
x187463 1y ago
Awesome. This is the cleanest ascii-art tool I've seen, so far. To date, I've been using https://asciiflow.com/#/ https://asciiflow.com/#/ and https://meatfighter.com/ascii-silhouettify/ https://meatfighter.com/ascii-silhouettify/ to create input text for TerminalTextEffects to create terminal animations like the following: https://chrisbuilds.github.io/terminaltexteffects/img/changeblog_media/0.12.0/beams_dynamic_astro_demo.gif https://chrisbuilds.github.io/terminaltexteffects/img/change... https://github.com/ChrisBuilds/terminaltexteffects https://github.com/ChrisBuilds/terminaltexteffects
- theologic 1y ago
  Thanks for posting this. Seems like an incredibly sharp implementation by simply bundling it into an HTML page. Extremely lightweight and portable.

605 points by mafro 1y ago

Monodraw is great. If I could change one thing, I would make it more expensive. $10 feels like a steal, given the use I've gotten out of it.

yeliu84 1y ago

The price is so good for such an amazing app. I'm in!

dickiedyce 1y ago

It's a really cracking little app, and great for inline docs.

ryanmarsh 1y ago

I really needed this 20 years ago.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

thomascgalvin 1y ago

I use Mermaid and such for a lot of technical documentation, but this seems like it's going to be much more straightforward, especially for quick and one-off diagrams. Very nice.

larodi 1y ago

This at least 10th post of Monodraw on hn https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8433417 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8433417 - oct 09 2014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9545252 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9545252 - may 14 2015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27832910 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27832910 - july 14 2021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32134469 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32134469 - july 18 2022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39651796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39651796 - march 9 2024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45037904 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45037904 - 1 year ago and the some all of these gained interest, so my conclusion is Monodraw benefits a lot from being regularly exposed to HN crowd.

danmur 1y ago
It's very effective. Both times I've wanted to give them my money. But mac only, geeze
- tracker1 1y ago
  In the same boat myself... would be nice if they'd develop a more portable version... that said, could probably make an extension for VS Code or Zed to do similar.
codazoda 1y ago
It's also allowed. This is my first exposure to it, despite being a regular. Looks like a cool app.
- inanutshellus 1y ago
  "If I haven't seen it, it's new to me!" feels apropos... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4nTu0ldFvQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4nTu0ldFvQ
  - Glant 1y ago
    One of today's lucky 10,000. https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
- larodi 1y ago
  My point being that it is a very neat way to now-and-then onboard some new users. Wonder if those submitting thew 'news' are in any way affiliated, or perhaps - from the team.
  - milen 1y ago
    The team is just me - the developer. There’s no affiliation whatsoever, I’m actually quite surprised every time Monodraw appears on the front page as the app just had its 10th birthday. I would have assumed most people in the community would know about it by now.

auggierose 1y ago

Really cool, and so sad at the same time.

j1000 1y ago

Wow, this is cool

stevage 1y ago

>Because it's all just text Hiding a lot of complications in that phrase. What text encoding? What font? etc.

__bb 1y ago

This app is great for writing code comments when you hit one of those “1000 words or 1 picture” cases for an explanation of something. Just checked and my most recent document is a diagram of data flows between two services. Highly recommended.

shadowgovt 1y ago

Once again, the tool that I really want to see on Linux is available on... MacOSX. (I wonder if there is a Linux alternative? Closest thing I use is the drawing mode in emacs).

icecheese 1y ago
You might try Durdraw. Not exactly the same as Monodraw, but it does color, utf8, animation, mouse drawing, etc, and runs in the terminal.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

progforlyfe 1y ago

sign. Another macOS-only tool. Yawn

waynecochran 1y ago

This is fantastic. If I can integrate it into an IDE for commenting my programs that would be next level.!

J_Shelby_J 1y ago

Can LLMs understand ascii drawings? Or produce them? I’m trying to figure out a way to organize thoughts with charts in a way that provides useful context to an LLM and also that an LLM could theoretically generate.

nemomarx 1y ago
I wonder how tokenizing ASCII would work - although you could try ocr?

dunsany 1y ago

Own it, love it... corporate standard is Lucidchart but prefer Monodraw.

kotsmanis 1y ago

I have given you my money and haven’t regretted it. Nice app!

docandrew 1y ago

My favorite diagramming tool hands-down! It’s the only one that’s ever “clicked” for me, I use it all the time.

psim1 1y ago

Reminiscent of TheDraw (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheDraw https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheDraw), a tool I used "back in the day" to create BBS artwork.

mustaphah 1y ago

Monodraw supports PNG, SVG, and ASCII. Truly universal… unless your universe happens to run Linux

durandal1 1y ago

Long time user of Monodraw, such a delightful app. My main use case is to draw view hierarchies, tables and diagrams in source comments.

cryptos 1y ago

Great idea, but sadly only for macOS :-(

kenanfyi 1y ago

One of the coolest apps I miss after switching to Linux. I still boot my Mac to create diagrams with it every now and then.

endymion-light 1y ago

Will love to buy this once I get my Mac. Looks great, and also love the perpetual license for $9.99 rather than the host of subscription services, i'll probably end up buying it just to support good practices.

JKCalhoun 1y ago
That's cool … but we're calling buying an app licensing it now? That word is a red flag for me — wondering what dark pattern is awaiting, finding myself digging for the fine print…
- endymion-light 1y ago
  true - it does say personal license, maybe there's some little print that says we own your entire project if it makes over $100
- milen 1y ago
  At least back in the day, it used to be common to "buy a license" or "buy a serial key". I didn't really put too much thought into the phrasing, as I haven't received any feedback. Regardless, when you buy it, it's yours forever - no activation, no DRM, no subscription, no fine print. (Monodraw developer here).
- quesera 1y ago
  Maybe just semantics? I think "license" is more technically correct. Even in the best consumer case, you are only "buying" a perpetual right to use a software product. Optionally, you might also get updates. In the US, the First-Sale Doctrine won't apply to software (unlike tangible books and records) so you probably do not have the right to sell your copy of this software to another person. Since that's not true ownership, I think it can only be described as a license. But I'll agree that all sorts of shenanigans can, and often do, hide under that generic term. However, "buy" could suggest many substantial rights that are not on offer (most importantly distribution), so it's a bit of a quandary. The phrase "Buy Now - $9.99, yours forever" might thread the needle. The sale page would still need to include all the legal terms, of course. I think "license" is a necessary word there.

LandR 1y ago

Mac only ?

mrzool 1y ago
Yes. Always nice to see good, Electron-free native apps for Mac.

NeutralForest 1y ago

Good occasion to mention a super nice ASCII/UTF drawing library for Emacs: https://github.com/tbanel/uniline https://github.com/tbanel/uniline

JohnKemeny 1y ago
Emacs has an artist-mode, you know.
- NeutralForest 1y ago
  I know! But this is way different since it aligns everything properly and can be used in tandem with artist mode, you should try it out!

mrzool 1y ago

Such an underrated app. I’ve used it for everything from network topologies and storage diagrams and even for my kitchen redesign. Works way better than every pricey specialized tool I’ve tried, and the ASCII outputs look way cooler with their old-school hacker ASCII aesthetic! Highly recommended.

mafro 1y ago

Latest release Apr 2025 introduced a plain text save file format, which plays nicer for source control. Great to see development is still active.

elashri 1y ago

It seems very good, is there anything comparable for Linux?

aaronius 1y ago
Not sure how comparable they are since I never used Monodraw due to not running MACs, but there is https://asciiflow.com/ https://asciiflow.com/ and https://monosketch.io/ https://monosketch.io/ which I usually use. The latter is using some advanced UTF8 characters and when trying to get it incorporated for my personal blog, I had to use their specific monospaced font from their repo, as otherwise lines wouldn't line up correctly.

thevinchi 1y ago

I’m a big fan of durdraw[1] for crafting ANSI/ASCII art in the terminal, but this takes it to a whole new level, excited to try this especially if it includes color? From the website examples it doesn’t appear to include a color palette, but if it does then game on! [1] https://github.com/cmang/durdraw https://github.com/cmang/durdraw

nikolayasdf123 1y ago

10 USD? how does this compare to asciiflow.com which is free and open-source?

fscaramuzza 1y ago
or even the "export to ascii" of draw.io? I would be happy to hear what the advantages could be.
- ostacke 1y ago
  How do you export to ascii in draw.io?
abm53 1y ago
The most obvious difference (and one worth much more than $10 to me) is that one is native and the other is not.
milen 1y ago
Monodraw's main selling point is that it's a fully native AppKit macOS app. If you value the experience, then you might like the app. asciiflow.com is great as well. (Monodraw developer here)

milen 1y ago

Developer of the app here, happy to answer any questions.

hiltmon 1y ago
Huge fan of the product, just wanted to say Thank You :)
- milen 1y ago
  Appreciated!
coxley 1y ago
Are there any enhancements that you've wanted to do, but haven't had the time? I'm a huge fan, and am surprised how stable Monodraw has been for me. I've kept a single, growing document open as a scratch pad for the last three years. The only downtime was converting it to the new-ish file format haha.
- milen 1y ago
  The top two features I want to add next are table support and some form of auto layout (like flexbox). I really care about stability and performance, so I’m happy to hear that it’s being appreciated.
  - dboon 1y ago
    There’s this layout library in C called clay which is basically a renderer agnostic flex box style layout engine. You might be interested in reading its source!
    - milen 1y ago
      Yeah, there's a few such libraries that I'm aware of but I haven't had time to evaluate them. I do plan to at least look into them and make decision from there.

billyp-rva 1y ago

Accessibility question: how do screen readers handle ascii art-style diagrams like this? It seems like they would be overwhelmed by the lines.

jen729w 1y ago
They don’t. You should aria-label it thus: role="img" aria-label="A styled box using monospace box-drawing characters. Its header is 'area complete', and there's a link to a forum post." (Happy to be corrected/updated here, I am not an a11y expert. I am a very happy Monodraw customer though!)
- billyp-rva 1y ago
  Would this tell the screen reader to just ignore it? Then you'd lose all accessibility for its content.
  - jen729w 1y ago
    I believe role=“img” tells it to behave like one, causing the descriptive text to be read out in its place.
    - billyp-rva 1y ago
      Yeah, that seems bad. The whole point of the diagram was to explain something better than prose could, and now it is lost. I'm thinking the case were someone can make out the shapes/arrows/colors well, but not the text.
      - jen729w 1y ago
        In my case, that's not why I'm using the diagram. It's simply a visual thing, to break up a page of text. Purely aesthetic.
  - cestith 1y ago
    The aria-label would be used to describe the content.

randomgermanguy 1y ago

Bought this couple months ago, and am now always looking for more ways to include this for inline-documentation. the fact i can export to clipboard and re-import it and reconstruct all the shapes etc. almost flawlessly is such a big win.

sorentwo 1y ago
Absolutely love monodraw for diagrams in documentation! All of the diagrams for Oban and Oban Pro are done this way: Job Lifecycle: https://hexdocs.pm/oban/job_lifecycle.html https://hexdocs.pm/oban/job_lifecycle.html Composition: https://oban.pro/docs/pro/1.6.4/composition.html https://oban.pro/docs/pro/1.6.4/composition.html
- marceldegraaf 1y ago
  Sidenote: thanks so much for taking the time to write the Oban docs. I'm a big user (and fan) of Oban, and the docs are fantastic.
avinassh 1y ago
> am now always looking for more ways to include this for inline-documentation. same lol. here is a blog post of mine where I used them - https://avi.im/blag/2024/disaggregated-storage https://avi.im/blag/2024/disaggregated-storage I had to convert them to images because I couldn't get to working with Hugo, static site generator
Etheryte 1y ago
On one hand, this could provide a lot of value as some things are just plain hard to explain using only words. On the other hand, aren't you worried about when someone else comes along and needs to update one of those comments? If they're not aware of this tool, it's either going to be incredibly tedious or simply not going to happen.
- randomgermanguy 1y ago
  As the other commenters put it, i dont think this is a huge issue. I usually use this for architecture level diagrams, and that shouldn't change often/at-all. In-case it does change, doing a new diagram is perfectly in-scope of whoevers working on that.

bayindirh 1y ago

I'm using this app since its first release. It's a great simple app I use for inline comment diagrams and more importantly server login banners. I love to login to a server with a customized banner and a tagline. It's just a small joy makes work more fun.

saltserv 1y ago

[dead]

noosphr 1y ago

Being able to include diagrams of what code is doing _inline_ is something that is vastly over looked by the majority of developers. It's one of the better parts of literate programming without typesetting.

inanutshellus 1y ago
I was struggling to come up with "worth it" ASCII-art-in-code scenarios for my codebase and found a post[1] with examples (that turns out to have been posted here in HN a while back[2]). Pretty cool. [1] https://blog.regehr.org/archives/1653 https://blog.regehr.org/archives/1653 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31891226 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31891226

pjmlp 1y ago

Now, that is something really cool, pity we didn't had something like that on BBS days.

myvoiceismypass 1y ago
I could have sworn I was using a tool called AcidDraw 30 years ago to design ascii bbbs login screens for use on Renegade systems.
arghgh 1y ago
Antique furniture meant something- it was done by hand. Same with ASCii- you could respect that it took some time to make it. What respect and feeling will there be for work in the future? Everything generated or thought cheaply generated on whims. Everything throwaway.
- pjmlp 1y ago
  Unfortunely the work in the future will be mostly done by our AI overloards.
- soulofmischief 1y ago
  Antique furniture is nice because it looks pretty and uses sturdy materials. I don't buy it for the pleasure of knowing how many hours, days or weeks a person slaved over it in order to pay rent. Good art is good art. Focusing on the time spent making it is a poor substitution for the ability to critique the art itself. Anyway, people made this same argument when image editors came into their own. There is a long, tiresome generational tradition of artists thinking the new crowd has it too easy and doesn't appreciate the grit that goes into making art in earlier mediums. We can do better.

diegobit 1y ago

Seems really cool and the price is fair! I'm gonna try it!

smusamashah 1y ago

Some relevant browser based ascii-drawing tools. https://app.monosketch.io/ https://app.monosketch.io/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210503172024/https://fatiherikli.github.io/archetype/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210503172024/https://fatiherik... https://textik.com/# https://textik.com/# https://asciiflow.com/#/ https://asciiflow.com/#/ https://fsymbols.com/draw/ https://fsymbols.com/draw/

agentultra 1y ago
Don’t forget emacs. It has artist-mode.
- hardwaresofton 1y ago
  TIL: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ArtistMode https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ArtistMode
- merelysounds 1y ago
  Vim’s modal editing, sans plugins, works surprisingly well for drawing too. Visual block mode is also helpful. At least in my experience, I built a puzzle game with pixel art elements[1] and I drew the initial puzzles in vim. [1]: https://apps.apple.com/app/nonoverse-nonogram-puzzles/id6748441182 https://apps.apple.com/app/nonoverse-nonogram-puzzles/id6748...
tracker1 1y ago
https://github.com/cwensley/pablodraw https://github.com/cwensley/pablodraw https://alternativeto.net/software/monodraw/ https://alternativeto.net/software/monodraw/

youcefb 1y ago

reminds me of https://github.com/casparwylie/cascii-core https://github.com/casparwylie/cascii-core

DavidPiper 1y ago

Haven't so quickly gone from "woah, that's cool" to "purchase now" in a long time. This is awesome and I will use it daily. There's a visual simplicity and legibility to the kind of straight-forward but slightly-decorated diagrams shown in the sample images. And the fact that I can now copy-paste them anywhere as well (rather than the classic "screenshot of a Miro or Paint.js board") is so cool.

ricokatayama 1y ago

That’s great. You gained a new customer. In the prompt's and Caves of Qud 1.0 era, I'd say ASCII art is a must, both in terms of UX and aesthetic in general.

MrGilbert 1y ago

While not exactly the same use case, I'd also like to point to REXPaint [1]. Same same, but different. And Windows only, though Wine might help under Linux. [1] https://www.gridsagegames.com/rexpaint/ https://www.gridsagegames.com/rexpaint/

x187463 1y ago

Awesome. This is the cleanest ascii-art tool I've seen, so far. To date, I've been using https://asciiflow.com/#/ https://asciiflow.com/#/ and https://meatfighter.com/ascii-silhouettify/ https://meatfighter.com/ascii-silhouettify/ to create input text for TerminalTextEffects to create terminal animations like the following: https://chrisbuilds.github.io/terminaltexteffects/img/changeblog_media/0.12.0/beams_dynamic_astro_demo.gif https://chrisbuilds.github.io/terminaltexteffects/img/change... https://github.com/ChrisBuilds/terminaltexteffects https://github.com/ChrisBuilds/terminaltexteffects

theologic 1y ago
Thanks for posting this. Seems like an incredibly sharp implementation by simply bundling it into an HTML page. Extremely lightweight and portable.