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Comment by systemvoltage | Hacker News Reader

The problem with ascii diagrams is that it is difficult to edit. Say you want to move that resistor in the circuit shown in the article. You could use something like Monodraw to combat that, but then I just end up using good ol' power point. There are only handful of instances when ascii diagrams are useful, may be like an IETF proposal.

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Yeah, agreed that they are hard to edit if you working by yourself, but disagreed if you are working collaboratively.

On "may be like an IETF proposal."", that's precisely where I've been using them the most :)

https://fedidcg.github.io/FedCM

Not for everybody, I agree, but it is kinda of ironic that you mentioned "may be like an IETF proposal." :)

Also, technical blog posts, e.g.

https://code.sgo.to/2022/04/11/metamath.html https://code.sgo.to/2022/04/28/siop.html

Ideally you need a block based editor. Kate is the only modern editor that I’ve used that I know has a block mode. Any others?

Now the question is how do you get a block based editor on a webpage?

I don't think I expect people to edit the diagrams on webpages, rather than locally using their favorite text editor.

Emacs and Vim have rectangle-editing commands, these are essential for reasonably convenient editing.

They're so useful, everyone should know them anyway: Need a column of '//' rather than '/* <long_comment_block> */', or vice-versa?. One click-drag and 4-5 keystrokes will do it.

notepad++ has block editing

> Kate is the only modern editor that I’ve used that I know has a block mode. Any others?

Depending on how you define "modern", vim (and I assume neo-vim) support block-mode.

You can move rectangular blocks around in VSCode

mcedit in mc file manager has block mode selection (Shift-F3).

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