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Comment by shock | Hacker News Reader

I wish there was a desktop app that allowed me to draw diagrams in "vector" ascii art that I could then process with `dia` or another similar program to produce images.

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Not exactly what you want, but macOS users can use the brilliant Monodraw to create ASCII images.

https://monodraw.helftone.com

Damn, that's really cool. Wish it wasn't mac only :(

There are a number of alternatives, some of which are outlined here: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/126630/creating-dia...

Well there is Emacs Artist Mode https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIuX87Xo8Fc

Thanks, that looks pretty good – I'm gonna give it a try. The only thing missing seems to be the "vector" part.

You may be interested in svgbob - https://github.com/ivanceras/svgbobrus

Thanks, svgbob looks really interesting; but what I'm missing is a tool to produce the ascii file to provide as input to svgbob/dia/etc.

asciio is the true answer :) In fact I love using pure ASCII diagram in my emails, text memos, etc :)

https://metacpan.org/pod/App::Asciio

As it's not completely obvious, Asciio will save to plain text if you simply use the .txt extension, and else its own binary editable format.

Asciio is present in Debian/Ubuntu repositories.

That looks very good! Thanks!

There is SvgBobRus, written in Rust: https://github.com/ivanceras/svgbobrus

Here's a demo: http://ivanceras.github.io/svgbob-editor/

I think this is what you're looking for: http://asciiflow.com/

I usually just write Graphviz dot files when I need something in a hurry.

Edit: nevermind, misunderstood; this isn't what you're looking for.

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