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Making ASCII Art in Vim

alexyang.dev

1–10 of 17 posts

Re: Making ASCII Art in Vim

#2
Awesome! I added your blog to the docs for an ascii art color syntax I wrote for my vim-like editor, I'd love if you checked it out

https://civboot.github.io/lua/asciigame.html

Note: right now the editor crashes if you mis-type any of the syntax... it's not really fully launched, going to fix that soon hopefully but you can see a [screenshot](https://civboot.github.io/img/asciigame.png) of what it looks like

Also, if you know any other good references for getting into asciiart I'd love to reference them as well.

Note: the Ele editor isn't _quite_ ready for all the asciiart features in your blog post, notably virtualedit and macros are not implemented yet - but I just added basic visual mode so it's getting close!

Re: Making ASCII Art in Vim

#4
Another slew of utility lies in `:help searchoffset`, often like the following: https://til.codeinthehole.com/posts/about-vims-semicolon-sea...

    /x/e-3
    /x/+1
    /x/;/yz
...it allows near arbitrary cursor placement (eg: this blog articles "squiggle" situation) to be able to find the beginning of the squiggle, or the end of the squiggle (or temporarily using "X" and "Z" for start/end, and "clearing" it with `V...:s/[XY]/./g`

Re: Making ASCII Art in Vim

#5
post #4

Another slew of utility lies in `:help searchoffset`, often like the following: https://til.codeinthehole.com/posts/about-vims-semicolon-sea... /x/e-3 /x/+1 /x/;/yz ...it allows near arbitrary cursor placement (eg: this blog articles "squiggle" situation) to be able to find the beginning of the squiggle, or the end of the squiggle (or temporarily using "X" and "Z" for start/end, and "clearing" it with `V...:s/[XY]/./…

Love it, this was new to me

Re: Making ASCII Art in Vim

#6
Visual block mode and virtual edit are such killer features of vim.

I also like plugins like https://github.com/nvim-mini/mini.move That allows you to move selected characters around; it's super useful to correct mistakes or reorder things quickly, and it's also very intuitive to make ASCII art with it!

Re: Making ASCII Art in Vim

#9
> It's also totally valid to not use this feature and just fill the buffer with spaces at the beginning of your session instead; just know that in Vim it's not absolutely necessary.

I actually set up a script to fill a temp file with a page worth of some "background" character and then open it with a special vimrc (mostly oriented around making it so that mouse drags use visual-block mode regardless of what mode I was in before).

Re: Making ASCII Art in Vim

#10
post #5
post #4

Another slew of utility lies in `:help searchoffset`, often like the following: https://til.codeinthehole.com/posts/about-vims-semicolon-sea... /x/e-3 /x/+1 /x/;/yz ...it allows near arbitrary cursor placement (eg: this blog articles "squiggle" situation) to be able to find the beginning of the squiggle, or the end of the squiggle (or temporarily using "X" and "Z" for start/end, and "clearing" it with `V...:s/[XY]/./…

Love it, this was new to me

It's one of those things you'd _never_ stumble over naturally, but once you're aware of the concept, it makes a ton of sense and you can immediately think of tons of uses for it.

    /def new_.*(/s+8
    /2026-/e
    /except/+1;/raise
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