131–140 of 218 posts
Hm. I'm interested in hearing more about the specific scenarios where this sort of tool is useful. I skimmed through the HN comments and see that it can be used for adding diagrams to code comments. But what else? Slack, Jira, READMEs, SMS, Signal etc all allow you to include pngs.
what's the native linux alternative? aka not a webapp edit: hm, maybe https://github.com/nkh/P5-App-Asciio
Or (sometimes) worth ten thousand words: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1551-6708.1987...
OMG this is one of my favorite tools paid for it all the way back when it went out. Have used it so many times just to write documentation for things like: https://github.com/ivank/potygen/blob/main/packages/potygen/... ASCII is just so versatile and allows you to put nice graphics in places where one does not expect, making things more easily understandable.
Those corners look like Unicode block chars.
OMG this is one of my favorite tools paid for it all the way back when it went out. Have used it so many times just to write documentation for things like: https://github.com/ivank/potygen/blob/main/packages/potygen/... ASCII is just so versatile and allows you to put nice graphics in places where one does not expect, making things more easily understandable.
Hmm, the "With Expression" diagram on line 656 looks fine in emacs, but in chrome at that actual link, everything on the right is mangled. (The characters look fine, it looks like github's font choices do poorly with the "load bearing whitespace" for the extended bits...)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If only it were true, that additions cannot nake things harder to read.
In this case, it is absolutely true. It is the difference between: // some comment and // some comment // additionally see ./diagram.png Diagrams are often useful tools for communicating information.
// some comment
// ... 25 lines of a diagram
// some comment
// additionally see ./diagram.pngASCII art, so great we built a GUI for it
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you feel the need to embed giant ASCII diagrams into a source file, I think you should just use a picture. Like a .png or .svg or something and write the documentation in another file. Or even maybe try out rich text source code.
The diagrams I am pasting in are usually like 80 x 40 chars and keep you from having to tab out into documentation. They don’t change often so they don’t create messy diffs. I don’t think that’s unreasonable. Nobody on my team seems to mind. I don’t think this is a problem and I’m having trouble understanding why you think it is. If you’re wondering why I need diagrams in source code, then the answer is I usually don…