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Shaky: ASCII Diagram to PNG

shaky.github.bushong.net

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Re: Shaky: ASCII Diagram to PNG

#13
post #9
post #4

This works very well with diagrams created using http://asciiflow.com/ Just tried it out and the export->copy->paste->save worked really, really well.

Is a great service, but I'd love to have something I can use locally. A _lot_ of my time diagramming is spent disconnected, transitioning over photos of whiteboards to actual diagrams. Are you aware of anything that is a local client?

Have you tried artist-mode in emacs?

Re: Shaky: ASCII Diagram to PNG

#14

These ideas always seem to top HN. They are cute, but interactive diagram editors have been around a while and, unfortunately, are just faster to use and are more flexible. Maybe it'd make more sense to just have one of these tools implement export to ACSII?

I think the appeal would be that, since it's text based, it's already supported by git/mercurial/svn/name-your-vcs. A binary format would need some sort of history/diff support inside it to work well with a specific plugin for s VCS. An XML-based format would integrate well with a VCS, but you lose the clarity of the ASCII based diagrams.

It may seem "cute" or "toyish", but I woudl try to use it before giving an opinion. I certainly did that with markdown and ended up moving a lot of docs to that format, right in the repos with the code.

Re: Shaky: ASCII Diagram to PNG

#16

These ideas always seem to top HN. They are cute, but interactive diagram editors have been around a while and, unfortunately, are just faster to use and are more flexible. Maybe it'd make more sense to just have one of these tools implement export to ACSII?

I think the appeal would be that, since it's text based, it's already supported by git/mercurial/svn/name-your-vcs. A binary format would need some sort of history/diff support inside it to work well with a specific plugin for s VCS. An XML-based format would integrate well with a VCS, but you lose the clarity of the ASCII based diagrams. It may seem "cute" or "toyish", but I woudl try to use it before giving an opin…

"since it's text based, it's already supported by git/mercurial/svn/name-your-vcs"

But doesn't that still apply if you had a visual tool exporting to ASCII? It'd save you the difficulty of moving sections around in a text editor, but give you the visual diff.

Re: Shaky: ASCII Diagram to PNG

#17

These ideas always seem to top HN. They are cute, but interactive diagram editors have been around a while and, unfortunately, are just faster to use and are more flexible. Maybe it'd make more sense to just have one of these tools implement export to ACSII?

I think the appeal would be that, since it's text based, it's already supported by git/mercurial/svn/name-your-vcs. A binary format would need some sort of history/diff support inside it to work well with a specific plugin for s VCS. An XML-based format would integrate well with a VCS, but you lose the clarity of the ASCII based diagrams. It may seem "cute" or "toyish", but I woudl try to use it before giving an opin…

This. I would love, as an author and teacher, to keep my flowcharts, diagrams, etc with my book code.

Right now I'm using SVG for that, but it's kinda rotten.

Re: Shaky: ASCII Diagram to PNG

#19

These ideas always seem to top HN. They are cute, but interactive diagram editors have been around a while and, unfortunately, are just faster to use and are more flexible. Maybe it'd make more sense to just have one of these tools implement export to ACSII?

I think the appeal would be that, since it's text based, it's already supported by git/mercurial/svn/name-your-vcs. A binary format would need some sort of history/diff support inside it to work well with a specific plugin for s VCS. An XML-based format would integrate well with a VCS, but you lose the clarity of the ASCII based diagrams. It may seem "cute" or "toyish", but I woudl try to use it before giving an opin…

SVG/GraphML are text based too
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