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Comment by timdorr | Hacker News Reader

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timdorr·

I kind of want the opposite of this: A GUI tool I can draw some diagram stuff out in that renders down to ASCII art.

Bonus points if it renders to Markdeep (or an equivalent) to be re-rendered as SVGs or whatever later on.

Edit: Here we go - http://asciiflow.com/

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I like it when these use actual box-drawing characters, ie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box-drawing_character or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_437.

Boxes made out of asterisks, dashes, and slashes appeal to me about as much as cutlery made out of recycled tin cans and coat hangers; it's the worst of both worlds, too ugly to qualify as real graphics and too distracting to be useful as text. Weirdly, the look worse than 'graphics' on the Commodore PET or TRS-80 (whose 'graphic' characters were helpfully printed on the keys and accessible through combination button presses).

Wow, I can't believe I went this long without realizing there were these characters specifically intended to be used in text based interfaces. It's funny, these are almost like the opposite of emojis, text trying to be graphics, rather than graphics trying to be text.

I remember playing with those ansí box characters back in the late 1990s... shit norton , microsoft and every other "graphical" ui for DOS used it.

There's also https://monodraw.helftone.com that lets you draw directly in ASCII.

Well actually that's more like Unicode Art ;)

Of course it's Mac only. :(

I like to use the vim plugin DrawIt for ascii diagrams:

https://www.thegeekstuff.com/2009/12/how-to-create-ascii-dra...

https://github.com/vim-scripts/DrawIt

Pretty easy to create comments for code that need a drawing for clear expositions.

http://asciiflow.com/

This is cool, but could benefit from some figlet-like text options

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