Hacker News Reader

Comment by dspillett | Hacker News Reader

I've seen this a few times. The key limit is that once drawn the characters are set, you can't move the drawn objects around.

What I'd like is something like drawio for ASCII/Unicode. I've been thinking of writing my own for years, but that'll probably never happen so I'll just keep mentioning the idea when similar apps come up in the hope I inspire someone else!

View on HN

Hey, maintainer here (sorta). We've both been super absent the last few years unfortunately but this was ultimately on our list for V3.

Now I just need to find some spare time...

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding you but this tool expressly has a select and move tool.

It does, but that selects and moves the cells not the objects and then redraws the cells? Actually, going back to have a play I see that it does allow some modification of existing objects but it isn't terribly flexible.

I've just done a quick search and found one that I've not spotted before, which is a bit closer to what I want in that one respect, but not nearly complete overall (and not seen a check-in in 8 years): https://textik.com/ - that might illustrate the key difference that I see missing in asciiflow.

If i understand you, the Mac-only Monodraw handles this fine. It lets you draw objects, point to objects (say like a diagram), and then move them around with the pointers auto adjusting to remain correct.

It's a shame that it's mac only.

> It's a shame that it's mac only.

Yeah, that looks to fit the bill nicely but is no use to me with my current mix of operating systems.

You can drag edges, but it doesn't seem to have a concept of a "square" beyond the tool itself. So after you've placed it, you can't move individual shapes around. The select works more like a text-editor's highlighter than something like the lasso tool in draw.io

It's a little tedius, but you can highlight sections and then drag the highlighted section around.

Also it would be nice to have some way of snapping boxes to a grid. Similar to creating new elements in figma. It was hard to tell when if all the boxes I made were aligned / same size.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com