ASCIIFlow • Hacker News Board

Re: ASCIIFlow

#11

Post by ctenb » Wed, Aug 27, 2025, 3:12 PM UTC

NoSalt wrote: post #4

Cool concept, but I couldn't get everything to work; namely the "Select & Move" on individual boxes or lines. The select area and move did work, though.

It works for me, but differently than I first thought. You don't select and move line shapes as a whole, but only segments in a perpendicular direction

Re: ASCIIFlow

#12

Post by ilovetux » Wed, Aug 27, 2025, 3:29 PM UTC

staplung wrote: post #9

ilovetux wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer, I just pulled this quote from Google ai which probably took it from somewhere else, but I just wanted to provide a little context. ASCII encoded text is also valid utf8. > The first 128 characters of Unicode, which are the same as the ASCII character set (characters 0-127), are encoded in UTF-8 using a single byte with the exact same binary value as their ASCII representation. This means that any file con…

Yes, but the box drawing characters in "ASCII" are all above 127 so they don't encode the same way. So that last AI generated sentence is basically false (or really misleading): ASCII files that consist only of characters in the lower 127 will also be valid UTF-8. But ASCII files that use characters above 127 will not be valid UTF-8. Now, technically, ASCII only concerns the lower 127 characters. There's no single st…

Granted, all of that is true, but GP specifically differentiated between ASCII and ASCII Extended, then GP went on to say that after choosing the ASCII option and pasting the text in a text editor on Mac it was reported as UTF-8, which I was pointing out would be true because if the ASCII option is chosen as opposed to the ASCII Extended option then what he ends up with (ASCII) is valid UTF-8 as reported by the text editor.

Re: ASCIIFlow

#13

Post by behnamoh » Wed, Aug 27, 2025, 3:35 PM UTC

Are there no-mouse alternatives? I hate drawing lines and boxes using mouse and I wish there was a way to write the "structure" and have it generate the ASCII art for that.

Re: ASCIIFlow

#14

Post by nonethewiser » Wed, Aug 27, 2025, 3:38 PM UTC

behnamoh wrote: post #13

Are there no-mouse alternatives? I hate drawing lines and boxes using mouse and I wish there was a way to write the "structure" and have it generate the ASCII art for that.

>I wish there was a way to write the "structure" and have it generate the ASCII art for that.

How would what it generates be any different than what you wrote?

Re: ASCIIFlow

#15

Post by Aissen » Wed, Aug 27, 2025, 3:44 PM UTC

behnamoh wrote: post #13

Are there no-mouse alternatives? I hate drawing lines and boxes using mouse and I wish there was a way to write the "structure" and have it generate the ASCII art for that.

It was on HN recently, the open source text-to-diagram tool d2 just launched an ascii output mode: https://d2lang.com/blog/ascii/

Re: ASCIIFlow

#16

Post by inanutshellus » Wed, Aug 27, 2025, 3:46 PM UTC

nonethewiser wrote: post #14

behnamoh wrote: post #13

Are there no-mouse alternatives? I hate drawing lines and boxes using mouse and I wish there was a way to write the "structure" and have it generate the ASCII art for that.

>I wish there was a way to write the "structure" and have it generate the ASCII art for that. How would what it generates be any different than what you wrote?

He doesn't want to click and drag with his mouse. Instead he wants an input box that lets him say "make a box [30] columns wide and [4] rows tall".

Re: ASCIIFlow

#17

Post by johnisgood » Wed, Aug 27, 2025, 3:54 PM UTC

There are lots of similar projects to this that made top HN the past week. Is there a list of it? I was not logged in and I lost history but the previous one I just saw earlier today was quite nice, too!

Edit: Oh apparently it was "Monodraw". There was yet another one besides that. I am all up for such tools. What was the name of the one that allowed you to specify the diagrams using some custom DSL which in turn would generate the diagrams themselves?

Re: ASCIIFlow

#18

Post by PhilipRoman » Wed, Aug 27, 2025, 3:56 PM UTC

behnamoh wrote: post #13

Are there no-mouse alternatives? I hate drawing lines and boxes using mouse and I wish there was a way to write the "structure" and have it generate the ASCII art for that.

graph-easy? It doesn't give you a lot of control though

Re: ASCIIFlow

#19

Post by behnamoh » Wed, Aug 27, 2025, 4:03 PM UTC

inanutshellus wrote: post #16

nonethewiser wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I wish there was a way to write the "structure" and have it generate the ASCII art for that. How would what it generates be any different than what you wrote?

He doesn't want to click and drag with his mouse. Instead he wants an input box that lets him say "make a box [30] columns wide and [4] rows tall".

Yes, exactly! Either in natural language or some DSL.

Re: ASCIIFlow

#20

Post by behnamoh » Wed, Aug 27, 2025, 4:05 PM UTC

Aissen wrote: post #15

behnamoh wrote: post #13

Are there no-mouse alternatives? I hate drawing lines and boxes using mouse and I wish there was a way to write the "structure" and have it generate the ASCII art for that.

It was on HN recently, the open source text-to-diagram tool d2 just launched an ascii output mode: https://d2lang.com/blog/ascii/

This is really close to what I wanted, thanks!