ASCII art for semantic code commenting

Re:ASCII art for semantic code commenting by dspillett on Wednesday February 09, 2022 @10:31AM (#30273766)

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!

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Re:ASCII art for semantic code commenting by junon on Wednesday February 09, 2022 @12:56PM (#30275748)

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...

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Re:ASCII art for semantic code commenting by taterbase on Wednesday February 09, 2022 @10:34AM (#30273802)

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

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Re:ASCII art for semantic code commenting by eenell on Wednesday February 09, 2022 @10:57AM (#30274164)

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

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Re:ASCII art for semantic code commenting by dspillett on Wednesday February 09, 2022 @10:55AM (#30274141)

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.

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Re:ASCII art for semantic code commenting by lijogdfljk on Wednesday February 09, 2022 @11:15AM (#30274378)

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.

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Re:ASCII art for semantic code commenting by dspillett on Wednesday February 09, 2022 @11:33AM (#30274638)

> 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.

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Re:ASCII art for semantic code commenting by anonymous_they on Wednesday February 09, 2022 @12:04PM (#30275007)

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.

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