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I have thought about this a lot. I was going to do some stuff with gzip, but fundementally, I came to the conclusion that the most elegant solution (no hidden chars / extra encoded data coupled with export) might actually be training a neural net to do it. Also, this would mean being able to import diagrams that weren't even made on Cascii. Training data can be self-generated too.

Perhaps a good middle ground would just be offering the gzip dump.

ftr1200on Show HN: Cascii – A portable ASCII diagram builder written in vanilla JavaScript

Bit of a nightmare getting this elegant enough on a phone, and doubt anyone wants to draw ASCII digrams on their phone anyway, so not really a priority!

ftr1200on Show HN: Cascii – A portable ASCII diagram builder written in vanilla JavaScript

It really depends how much demand there is. It's a great next step but a lot of work - I was thinking about training a neural net to parse images / 3rd party diagrams into Cascii, but right now I need a break from my screen for a few weeks :)

ftr1200on Show HN: Cascii – A portable ASCII diagram builder written in vanilla JavaScript

Yeah I'd like to talk about going back to basics with single-HTML / vanilla JS. It was a great experience, though admittedly controversial and I was expecting more people to be anti it.

ftr1200on Show HN: Cascii – A portable ASCII diagram builder written in vanilla JavaScript

Please see https://cascii.app where short links are coupled with your exports

ftr1200on Show HN: Cascii – A portable ASCII diagram builder written in vanilla JavaScript

Nice! Yea it should be easy to use the internal layerManager.import and .encodeAll

This might break state for the online version, but I can do some tweaks and get it merged if you open the PR.

to be clear, the short url feature is useful in that other people can easily edit / update diagrams they see referenced in code comments. If privacy is a concern and you're not distributing the diagram, then indeed exporting JSON is a good way to go.

ftr1200on Show HN: Cascii – A portable ASCII diagram builder written in vanilla JavaScript

I know it's controversial to do things this way, but given it's a personal project and focuses on portability, I think the benefits are worth while.

I have taken care to break things up, comment, etc - if you start at main(), you may find it's not any more difficult to follow than if i'd broken it up. Just because it's one file doesn't mean it doesn't separate concerns.

ftr1200on Show HN: Cascii – A portable ASCII diagram builder written in vanilla JavaScript

Thank you!

ftr1200on Show HN: Cascii – A portable ASCII diagram builder written in vanilla JavaScript

Glad you asked. Have you checked the online version https://cascii.app

There, all exported drawings come with a short link. This is so that months later anyone reading / seeing can edit their own copy online / keep it up to date.

You can also create an account to manage your own drawings.

Side note - when you use real pasting, it will not remember meaningful information (that's very hard to do elegantly). In your example, I'm guessing that 3x3 table you pasted in could not be properly edited like a table again. Hence, use short links so that Cascii remembers state.

ftr1200on Show HN: Cascii – A portable ASCII diagram builder written in vanilla JavaScript

Fixed. Thanks for raising :)

ftr1200on Show HN: Cascii – A portable ASCII diagram builder written in vanilla JavaScript

A co-worker recently showed me this. It seems really good. If they did ASCII diagrams I'd probably have never made this project!

ftr1200on Show HN: Cascii – A portable ASCII diagram builder written in vanilla JavaScript

Really glad to hear it. Enjoy!

ftr1200on Show HN: Put Diagrams in Your Code

Thank you! I’m hoping the short link feature makes it useful over time / maintainable which would otherwise be tricky for when code changes.

ftr1200on Show HN: Put Diagrams in Your Code

Interesting. I haven't come across this one before. I always found auto-rendering ones to be annoyingly less predictable. Thanks for sharing.

ftr1200on Show HN: Leaflet.pub – a web app for creating and sharing rich documents

This is fantastic. Good job. Makes you realise how much clutter is out there (SaaS nonsense, ads, paywalls, bullshit).

Loading the landing page was a breathe of fresh air. Thank you.

ftr1200on Calendar.txt

ha, well, nothing to hide to that extent.

I don't know about Keep, but it's another app, which is kind of my point - I already use Gmail.

ftr1200on Calendar.txt

I use my Gmail drafts as permanent, in-sync notes (with subject as the title of each note) Why?

- No extra app needed

- Keeps them quite hidden / private / secure

- Always easy access (I always have emails open)

- In sync with different devices