Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Monodraw: ASCII art editor for the Mac

monodraw.helftone.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 109 posts

Re: Monodraw: ASCII art editor for the Mac

#41

Post by heyoni »

noxa wrote: post #5
GekkePrutser wrote: post #2

This looks really cool. Well done! And no electron. Will definitely try it out

I somewhat understand the hate for electron but as a non-Mac user I'd much rather have access to this app - and I suspect the author would rather have me pay them for it. For such niche software it seems silly to build it so platform specific.

To get that kind of native feel in an electron app is either impossible or going to take a lot more work than just using native SDK's. There's a reason people hate on electron, because it's a bloated alternative that merely comes close to having a native feel.

Re: Monodraw: ASCII art editor for the Mac

#42

Post by avinassh »

I learned about Monodraw from Thorsten Ball’s interpreter / compiler books. The book has really beautiful illustrations and ASCII drawings, when I asked the author they directed me to Monodraw

Here is a sample chapter from the book (in PDF) - https://compilerbook.com/sample.pdf

Re: Monodraw: ASCII art editor for the Mac

#43

Post by oneweekwonder »

While Monodraw seems to have business related features I feel the need to mention "Mœbius ANSI Art Editor"[0] a cross platform open source alternative.

Moebius is a new ANSI and ASCII Editor for MacOS, Windows, and Linux.

With a neat Moebius Server feature that allows collaboration by multiple users on the same canvas through a server instance.

[0]: https://blocktronics.github.io/moebius/

Re: Monodraw: ASCII art editor for the Mac

#44

Post by smoldesu »

JaggerJo wrote: post #14
ajford wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get the hate that Electron gets for it's weight and overhead, but this is a perfect example of why Electron has value. This app has no dependency on native OS for anything beyond writing data. It doesn't need to compile heavy code bases, it doesn't need fast GPU or other access. It could have very well been an electron app, and it would have the benefit of being widely available on many platforms. I'd love to be ab…

It would not be possible to do this in electron. To have the same great native feeling UI you’d need to use AppKit - not HTML. Don’t get me started at the usual shortcuts and general platform behavior most electron apps get wrong.

It's totally possible to do this in Electron. I've used plenty of Electron apps that were simply ripped off MacOS and dumped on Linux (Kitematic, for example). The entire Mac-native UI works perfectly fine on Linux, the only issue I ran into involved some Mac-ified ini files.

Re: Monodraw: ASCII art editor for the Mac

#45

Post by haswell »

Zababa wrote: post #39
JaggerJo wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would not be possible to do this in electron. To have the same great native feeling UI you’d need to use AppKit - not HTML. Don’t get me started at the usual shortcuts and general platform behavior most electron apps get wrong.

The insistance on native feeling UI and shortcuts is something I only see from Mac users. I think the app would work perfectly well in Electron but would just attract the usual complaints from Mac users.

One potential conclusion: Mac users understand the productivity increase and the value of apps feeling native, since the Apple ecosystem is one of the primary places to get such a native experience today.

This shouldn't necessarily be interpreted as "Mac users are special flowers", but rather, "Mac users may have stronger opinions about this because they've experienced the benefits of native apps".

I've been around the block with operating systems, and was primarily a Linux user for many years. Later in my career, I started to appreciate the simplicity and consistency of the Apple ecosystem, and while I recognize that's not everyone's thing, it lets me focus on the job at hand and spend less time learning how to use new apps/tools. This is valuable.

Re: Monodraw: ASCII art editor for the Mac

#46

Post by ajford »

haswell wrote: post #45
Zababa wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The insistance on native feeling UI and shortcuts is something I only see from Mac users. I think the app would work perfectly well in Electron but would just attract the usual complaints from Mac users.

One potential conclusion: Mac users understand the productivity increase and the value of apps feeling native, since the Apple ecosystem is one of the primary places to get such a native experience today. This shouldn't necessarily be interpreted as "Mac users are special flowers", but rather, "Mac users may have stronger opinions about this because they've experienced the benefits of native apps". I've been around t…

Another take on it is that Mac decided to go a different path on a few different UI things in the past, and that has persisted to this day.

Look at how *nix, Windows, Sun, BSD, Chrome OS (which is basically a linux anyways) all use Ctrl, Meta (alt), and Shift for their hotkeys, compared to how Mac uses Hyper (cmd).

Also look at how Mac has one instance of an app's tool bar/menu that all windows share.

I'll agree that the consistent UI is a boon, but there's a large lack of discoverability imo, and some things that are just entirely lacking, like the ability to move windows around with hotkeys.

Re: Monodraw: ASCII art editor for the Mac

#47

Post by Zababa »

haswell wrote: post #45
Zababa wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The insistance on native feeling UI and shortcuts is something I only see from Mac users. I think the app would work perfectly well in Electron but would just attract the usual complaints from Mac users.

One potential conclusion: Mac users understand the productivity increase and the value of apps feeling native, since the Apple ecosystem is one of the primary places to get such a native experience today. This shouldn't necessarily be interpreted as "Mac users are special flowers", but rather, "Mac users may have stronger opinions about this because they've experienced the benefits of native apps". I've been around t…

That's a great conclusion. Sadly the way it's usually felt is through entitlement. I can't count the number of time where I've seen an electron/Flutter/anything app presented, and Mac users are once again asking for a native app while pretending to not understand why the app is cross platform in the first place.

If they're so attached to native apps, maybe they should build a website/community where people ready to pay more for native apps can say they want for example a native client for slack, discord, spotify, and then the companies can see if it's viable or not.

My problem is that these complaints are exactly like "the back button is broken", it doesn't bring anything new or interesting to talk about, people never propose to help a project or to pay money for new features, they just complain and never stop. This isn't good content for Hacker News in general.

Re: Monodraw: ASCII art editor for the Mac

#48

Post by robertoandred »

ajford wrote: post #40
JaggerJo wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would not be possible to do this in electron. To have the same great native feeling UI you’d need to use AppKit - not HTML. Don’t get me started at the usual shortcuts and general platform behavior most electron apps get wrong.

I'd be interested to hear as to why you couldn't achieve the functionality of this app in Electron. I agree with you that it's almost impossible to get a native UI feel in electron, but that's not always the first priority. If the end goal of the application is to present a custom interface for drawing on a monospace grid for ASCII art, I'm not sure I see the argument that a native UI is necessary over any cross-plat…

One example: native document-based Mac apps have file handling functionality in the window's titlebar (rename, move, tag, etc). It's very convenient. Electron apps don't.

Another: native Mac apps by default reopen where you left off. Open windows, open documents, etc. Electron doesn't get this functionality automatically; you could spend time recreating it, but it still would integrate with native settings.

Another small example: native Mac UI controls reflect the system-wide accent color the user's selected. With Electron, you'd have to either spend time rebuilding the functionality or omit it.

Mac users like Macs because Macs work like Macs. Electron apps ignore the benefits and features Mac apps usually get automatically and just revert to the lowest common denominator.

Re: Monodraw: ASCII art editor for the Mac

#50

Post by misternugget »

avinassh wrote: post #42

I learned about Monodraw from Thorsten Ball’s interpreter / compiler books. The book has really beautiful illustrations and ASCII drawings, when I asked the author they directed me to Monodraw Here is a sample chapter from the book (in PDF) - https://compilerbook.com/sample.pdf

Ha! I was going to comment in here that I used Monodraw for the book and really fell in love with the tool.

What I did more recently is to use Monodraw to create diagrams of CFGs and put those next to the test cases (see [0] or [1]) which exercise those graphs - the power of ASCII, you can just copy the graphs into your code.

[0]: https://twitter.com/thorstenball/status/1363053307409932288 [1]: https://twitter.com/thorstenball/status/1368802505963016197

Post reply on HN