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Monosketch

monosketch.io

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101–110 of 144 posts

Re: Monosketch

#101

Post by spockz »

bargainbin wrote: post #13
aanet wrote: post #2

Looks fab. Great design. Can it make polygons? Basically, shapes other than rectangles? If so, how? (maybe I missed it?)

Not the author but I'm making a similar tool currently, and the reality is no because of the nature of it being character based. You can theoretically have "artistic" polygons where it renders using a mixture of characters to emulate how that grid would be filled if a certain shaped was laid over it but the end result wouldn't be very functional for the purposes of diagramming.

If we have syntax highlighting build into the TrueType font, can’t we also get sticky lines with the same mechanism? It would then only work with the right font obviously.

Re: Monosketch

#102

Post by ezekg »

frizlab wrote: post #30

I use Monodraw[0]. Best purchase I ever made. [0] https://monodraw.helftone.com/

This is my most missed app since switching from Mac to Windows. This new kid on the block looks like a solid replacement, though! Will definitely be checking it out.

Re: Monosketch

#103

Post by dsego »

Brajeshwar wrote: post #48
frizlab wrote: post #30

I use Monodraw[0]. Best purchase I ever made. [0] https://monodraw.helftone.com/

I bought it too. I think most of us seem to bought it almost 10 years ago. Don’t use it much, but it is there when needed once in a while.

Right now you can just tell claude to generate an ascii diagrama, or even svg. I did a few days ago when I wanted to share a flow diagram of one particular flow in our app.

Re: Monosketch

#106

Post by Sharlin »

wingmanjd wrote: post #21
Sharlin wrote: post #15

Hate to be that guy, but ASCII doesn't contain box-drawing characters or arrows. I guess it's a lost cause though…

Doesn't it have those characters via extended ASCII? I seem to recall making boxes with characters back in my BASIC class.

As brazzy said, there's no such thing as extended ASCII. There's just a huge number of ASCII-compatible eight-bit encodings. The original IBM (and DOS) character set, hardwired into ROM, is the one you're thinking of, and went by various names such as "Personal Computer, MS-DOS United States, MS-DOS Latin US, OEM United States, DOS Extended ASCII (United States), PC-ASCII" [1].

DOS 3.3, in 1987, was the first version to support localized character sets, via a system of "code pages". You'd select an encoding/"character set" that suits your language in AUTOEXEC.BAT – or just used the default 437 if you were a US user and never had to worry about these things. For me, the most relevant code page was 850, aka "OEM Multilingual Latin 1" (not at all the same as ISO/IEC 8859-1 which is also known as "Latin 1").

Why the apparently arbitrary numbers, I'm not sure, but Claude and ChatGPT both claim the codes were simply drawn from a more general-purpose sequence of product numbers used at IBM at the time.

This application, like other similar ones, uses Unicode box drawing characters that now all reside comfortably out of the eight-bit range.

[1] https://www.aivosto.com/articles/charsets-codepages-dos.html

Re: Monosketch

#107

Post by bonsai_spool »

kens wrote: post #90
akd wrote: post #63

What is the purpose of ASCII diagramming today? Seems like graphics are supported by every document and communications medium that I use. Is it for including directly in code?

My unpopular opinion is that programming is stuck in the 1970s: a lot of programmers use a 1970s-style terminal window to enter 1970s OS commands, which run on a 1970s processor architecture (which is slowly getting replaced by a 1980s architecture). They use a 1970s editor (which is much superior to the other 1970s editor) to write programs in a 1970s language. ASCII diagrams are just a symptom of this. Hardware is…

What is there to improve? Very genuinely.

A car has had largely the same shape since its creation, indeed since antiquity.

Sometimes, a problem space is explored to most humans' needs, and no more innovation is needed.

(edit: this said, I'm hopeful there is something new, and people like Bret Victor may show the way with things like https://dynamicland.org/ )

Re: Monosketch

#108

Post by pizza »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #76
cadamsdotcom wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> he’ll do it Quick note - be careful of gendering & anthropomorphising large language models, since you’re talking to a non-human machine so should be wary of how it can affect your mindset.

Anthropic, both in the name, and in their model cards, agressively anthropomorphize their models. You probably should start doing it. Ghost in the Shell is about super intelligent AI creating a "ghost" (scientifically understood version of the soul) out of thin air. I believe such a thing is possible. The same movie literally predicted model merging (the end of the film the AI model merges with the major) to a tee. F…

The possibility of intelligent machines undergoing transformative regeneration actually dates back to a party hosted by one Charles Babbage where, in attendance, was one Charles Darwin, who only thereafter published On the Origin of Species

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Babbage%2527s_Saturday...

Re: Monosketch

#109

Post by plagiarist »

kens wrote: post #90
akd wrote: post #63

What is the purpose of ASCII diagramming today? Seems like graphics are supported by every document and communications medium that I use. Is it for including directly in code?

My unpopular opinion is that programming is stuck in the 1970s: a lot of programmers use a 1970s-style terminal window to enter 1970s OS commands, which run on a 1970s processor architecture (which is slowly getting replaced by a 1980s architecture). They use a 1970s editor (which is much superior to the other 1970s editor) to write programs in a 1970s language. ASCII diagrams are just a symptom of this. Hardware is…

I wish it were stuck in the 1970s! (Although the mouse had been invented by then.) I do not want the mouse and I do not want all these windows. If I am using agents I want the mouse even less.

This is not historical reasons, this is just that moving my hands from the keyboard to the mouse is inefficient and technically unnecessary. I prefer mouse only on niche (for me) tasks like screenshot cropping or something.

I am about to test out Niri on my laptop and I expect to be quite pleased with the change.

Re: Monosketch

#110

Post by afandian »

kens wrote: post #88
afandian wrote: post #22

Pedantic note to people using 'ASCII' in this thread (although Monosketch tool does't (EDIT actually does) claim to be ASCII). It uses e.g. "◎" U+25CE BULLSEYE which definitely isn't. And the 'ascii-driven-development' blog post mentioned downthread even uses emojis.

A historical note: even though the line/box-drawing characters go back to the IBM PC, they aren't ASCII. The PC used Code page 437, which added a bunch of characters to ASCII. To be genuinely ASCII, you need to draw your boxes with pipes and hyphens (| and -).

If you want a _real_ graphics mode in the spare bits of ASCII, check out MODE 7 (teletex) of the BBC Micro, page 488.

https://www.bbcmicrobot.com/docs/BBC_User_Guide.pdf

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