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Comment by milen | Hacker News Reader

If you're on macOS, definitely check out Monodraw [1] as a quick and easy way to create such diagrams (then copy + paste into ShakyDraw). Just remember to set your document alphabet to ASCII and you're good to go (from the inspector).

Full disclosure: I'm the developer of Monodraw. If you have any questions, happy to answer here.

[1] https://monodraw.helftone.com

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It's pretty lame to promote your product on someone else's thread. Just saying.

It's called marketing a relevant product to a relevant crowd. Just saying.

This is really great! Is there a way to paste/import a previously exported graph and preserve edit capabilities?

That's a very good question that comes up quite often. Unfortunately, that's not currently supported :(

In fact, it's technically impossible to recover all the information that was originally present in the Monodraw document because the conversion to text is inherently lossy. Now, you can probably try to use some heuristics to recover as much information as possible (e.g., detect boxes, arrows). That would certainly work in many simple cases where there's no overlapping shapes.

Having said that, I've got other, higher priority updates planned in the pipeline before I can even consider whether to tackle this problem.

you could maybe embed the original ascii, or a meta representation of it in the generated image?

That looks great! What are the export formats? This would be a fantastic way to create TikZ diagrams.

It supports text (ASCII and Unicode modes), PNG and SVG.

Monodraw is awesome. Some folks in my team use it to create page layout prototypes (to force minimalism)

Windows really needs a Monodraw.

Should I use moondraw with a wacom tablet, or just the trackpad?

I would say trackpad, it's less drawing - more diagrams.

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