ASCIIFlow Infinity
asciiflow.com
asciiflow.com
Also, this looks like it is the repository for ASCIIFlow and you can run it locally:
EDIT: What would be extra awesome would be a mode where it saves SVG. And/or a tool that renders SVG as ASCII art.
EDIT: Also, JavE does much more than asciiflow, as it even allows you to create ASCII movies.
X
+----+XX----------+
| XX |
| XX |
| +XXX------+
| | XXXXX
+-------+ XXX
If I try to resize
a rectangle that's
crossed by a free-form
curve, it stops being
a rectangle.
(Now that I think, I could also use this as a feature).Author here - it does but it doesn't, which is why it doesn't always work so well. It never actually keeps track of the shapes in a seperate data model - the text itself is the only data model. When you resize, it retraces out the lines that need editing. I did this as the expected use case is for diagrams in code, where diagrams may be copy pasted in and out of the tool and I'd lose any underlying models that I was working with. For fun: https://github.com/lewish/asciiflow2/blob/master/js-lib/draw....
However, please change the icon of Freeform Drawing Tool. Because currently that icon make it looks like a Curve Drawing Tool in the first glance.
The downside is it has very limited sex appeal for *.managers. Microsoft Visio has turned diagrams into blinding tapestries of overpriced clipart, fancy arrows, and logos. Worst of all, its an enabler for the cardinal sin of diagrams: overlapping lines.
Plenty of editors support it, both console (vim/emacs) and GUI-based (VSCode, Sublime).
I understand the impetus to keep things simple. But PNG image export would be a tremendous boon to me. Should be trivial as you are just drawing text to the canvas, no?
First, I don't like the idea of being tied to a webservice for my map drawing tools. I would really like the source code so I can self-host. I looked around the new updated asciiflow website and didn't see any links to source so correct me if I'm wrong.
Second, and most importantly, as a senior sysadmin over the years I have seen hundreds of network maps, the vast majority of them being in visio due to it having market dominance, and there is a problem that neither visio or it's competitors has addressed, and that's automated network mapping with versioning so you can diff and walk back in time. It's the thing even the best automappers still don't do right because they tend to get the topology wrong (such as one of my favorite automappers like librenms's).
This is why one of the utilities I have been working on is a bash-script cobbling together nwdiag (http://blockdiag.com/en/nwdiag/index.html), a subset of the blockdiag, with nmap and (h/f)ping scanners as the generating input and cronified daily versionable text output with checksums, with bonus things like new kea-dhcp lease triggering rescan via the kea restful api.
I think the future of network maps needs to be both automated and text based to enable admins and executives the ability to fully visualize the network at any given state in time, with the ability to walk the cat back with confidence in the accuracy of the map you are looking at(I would like to integrate gpg as well).
It's not quite ready for release, (sitting in my github projects folder waiting for push), but I lazily named it anmap for automated-network-mapper.
So right now how I use it personally is I have an emacs-org mode file that is cronified to output daily latex pdf reports that calls the bash script and generates the output map which is then listed inside the rest of the org-mode systems report which does other stuff like give me go-no-go on system usage via stuff like lynis, rkhunter, ckrootkit, and ossec.
tldr - Basicallly the network map industry is extremely ripe for competition and all these web-based network mapping tools are still not addressing a core needs usecase for sysadmins.
- [0] https://www.robinwieruch.de/learn-react-before-using-redux/
Is that new? It looks like Google requires you to register as a non-profit to use it. Am I looking at the wrong thing?
It allows saving the object format for later modification or export as pure ascii text, as needed. And it works on all platforms that support Perl (a lot).
I do wish I could toggle the background and view the diagram on blank white; having the grid visible makes some things look more obvious than without, and that would be useful to know ahead of time.
So an arrow to a box might look like ----^
I wrote a number of articles on it, and soon will open up an online version of the prototype. Love to get your feedback.