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

Monosketch

monosketch.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 144 posts

Re: Monosketch

#31

Post by afandian »

thom wrote: post #25

I'd love some version of these tools that could reliably round-trip pure text. Some heuristic or model that can actually recognise boxes, lines with anchors, parent-child relationships etc, so you can paste in pure text and immediately start rearranging stuff. My experience with Monodraw was that you had to maintain the original file format to do this, so once a diagram was in a markdown file or whatever, you couldn'…

This is surely possible.

You need to find the monospace whitespace characters (seems there's a few [0]). Then encode a compressed version of the logical diagram in the white space, steganography style.

Or do something with characters [1] to compress a lot of data into a tiny ball of hair at the end.

Draw.io smuggles the XML in a PNG which I've always admired.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_character

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combining_character

Re: Monosketch

#32

Post by TonyStr »

Great app!

It clicked for me once I realized you can ctrl+shift+C to copy the diagram to text, and paste in my editor! But I wonder if it would be possible to make ctrl+C copy to clipboard as ASCII? I see that ctrl+C copies the json representation of the selected objects, but surely it would be possible to maintain an internal model of copied objects, while the clipboard is always filled with usable ASCII? I think I've seen some applications do this before

Re: Monosketch

#33

Post by brazzy »

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.

"Extended ASCII" is just a sloppy term for a bunch of other encodings that are not, in fact, ASCII.

If your BASIC class used (or emulated) a C64 or compatible, you were using https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PETSCII and if it used MS-DOC you were using https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codepage_437

Re: Monosketch

#34

Post by sbondaryev »

rvz wrote: post #16
sbondaryev wrote: post #5

Nice project! This pairs nicely with ASCII-Driven Development - for iterating and modifying layouts with AI. https://medium.com/@calufa/ascii-driven-development-850f6666...

That does not make any sense at all in the long run. Not everything has to be done in arcane ASCII diagrams because of vibes and LLMs. This is yet another fad destined to be forgotten.

That's fair. It's just a suggestion - it's been useful for me in early stages of UI prototyping.

Re: Monosketch

#36

Post by hackrmn »

Tip: look into setting the value of the `spellcheck` HTML attribute/property to `false` for your element labels -- I am looking at red wavy underlines under every "GND", "uF" etc, on the [linked] front page. Spell-checking is obviously practically useless since these labels aren't meant to be spell English (or otherwise) words, I imagine.

Re: Monosketch

#37

Post by ndegruchy »

frizlab wrote: post #30

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

Absolutely. Handy for making diagrams or just doodling and making custom headers for config files with `fig` and some boxes and shadows!

Re: Monosketch

#38

Post by re5i5tor »

atentaten wrote: post #14

Very nice. It would be great to see this as an Obsidian plugin.

Slightly off topic but I am writing an Excalidraw MCP that allows Claude Code and Claude.ai to create Excal drawings and then iterate on them — I gave Claude the ability to “see” the resulting drawing via a tool that runs a rendering pipeline and returns a png to the model. It’s producing the Olympic logo pretty nicely ;-)

Re: Monosketch

#39

Post by simgt »

nasso_dev wrote: post #19

this is super cool as an art form but ASCII art is an accessibility nightmare so please don't use it for docs unless you know what you're doing and have made it accessible in some other way

Is it still true with llms being so good at interpreting it? I just tried all the examples on the home page, it works perfectly. In the past couple months I've moved almost entirely back to the terminal because I can just ask my coding agent to "have a look at this tmux session".

Re: Monosketch

#40

Post by esseph »

afandian wrote: post #24
andsoitis wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pedantic note to people using 'ASCII' in this thread (although Monosketch tool does't claim to be ASCII). In big ASCII letters on the landing page: Unleash your ideas with ASCII [] MonoSketch is a powerful ASCII sketching and diagramming app that lets you effortlessly transform your ideas into visually stunning designs. :-)

I claimed a few things. I never claimed I could read.

You and Floyd Mayweather
Post reply on HN