Hacker News Reader

Comment by vihren | Hacker News Reader

That seems pretty great, but I always have the problem of creating the ASCII art in the first place. Is there a tool to help with that?

View on HN

The best I've found is emacs picture-mode.

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Ba...

Here is a good summary:

http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/emacs_ascii_diagram.html

I love how after all these years I can still find out random new things about emacs I didn't know. It's a treasure trove of capabilities.

For general chart drawing (box, lines, arrows, text) I've used asciiflow[0] a few times.

[0] http://asciiflow.com/

I can second that. It also supports import which I then use to update documentation.

If you're on a mac, try monodraw. It's discontinued, but it's cheap and works great (it's basically a full featured diagramming app – with text output).

I really liked monodraw but am reluctant to pay for a license now that it's more or less been abandoned. I still like it, but only bought a copy for work at megacorp and foolishly didn't put it in my name.

I'm not sure I understand this attitude. It's a pitty it failed commercially. But it's a great app that only costs a tenner and works well (probably way better than any available alternative). And it can "save" as text, so it's not like you're going to lose all your work.

Surely, a good investment for anyone above minimum wage who does ascii art periodically on a mac?

What makes you think it's abandoned? The author is active on Twitter, the last update for dark mode was in May 2019 and I don't see any show stopper bugs or crashes on Catalina. Small utilities like this don't need an update every month. I bought it a while ago because

1) It's very cheap and a great show case for a small niche Mac app that's both beautiful and works well

2) The two times per year I use it, it's already worth it and fun to play around with.

https://blog.helftone.com

What makes you think it's abandoned?

The last blog entry I saw was that it's been put into maintenance mode. If your interest has fizzled but you still want to keep the product out there, that's a great use case for open source. I'm just not that inclined to pay for something that's not being actively developed.

Obviously at some point last year it got a new feature (yay). That speaks to the app itself being feature incomplete.

Shameless plug: https://mbarkhau.keybase.pub/asciigrid/

The website itself is an interactive editor, for what that's worth

Reply on news.ycombinator.com