I use Monodraw[0]. Best purchase I ever made.
I also use Monodraw, can only recommend with one caveat: @Dear Monodraw developers, if you're reading this, please please please implement discarding text edit popups using ESC, it's been years and I still keep reaching for ESC every time I use Monodraw. I tried decompiling it to binary patch it, but unfortunately it messes up the update mechanism.
Absolutely. Handy for making diagrams or just doodling and making custom headers for config files with `fig` and some boxes and shadows!
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.
+++ Monodraw is awesome!
If you use Emacs, there's a pretty nifty package https://github.com/tbanel/uniline
Pretty cool (and the linked in the comments monodraw I’m buying today it looks great too).
I’ve actually been tinkering with a web app (as a test bed for various spec driven dev frameworks with Claude code) a wireframing tool for TUI apps. Conceptually similar to figma almost, infinite canvas and all that jazz, but has premade components for the Ink TUI library (idea would be to support a few popular TUI frameworks eventually) and you can just drag and drop and design TUI interfaces, then download the skeleton code generated by the app for the whole frame.
I don’t know how far I’m going to take it, but it works so far. A picture is worth a thousand words, a picture of word characters in a ui layout is worth something right?
I’ll probably open source it eventually, I doubt there’s much of a commercial market opportunity for it
Love this idea. Would be cool to have a wysiwyg for https://ratatui.rs
Looks promising. Coming from excalidraw, I can't live without the numbered 1-5 shortcuts to select the tool (instead of remembering R for rectangle, L for line, ...). Also a mode to "lock in" the current tool so I can draw many rectangles back to back. Those two things would make a huge difference in how fast I can sketch things out in this.
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.
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.
> 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.
Maybe if it was all in emoji?
You and Floyd Mayweather
That circuit schematic in the header is wrong enough to look like an AI-generated hallucination of what a schematic is from the "human with extra fingers" stage of image generation. Inconsistent symbol styles, missing pin labels, a shorted capacitor in the upper-left, etc.
For a native macOS app, there is also Monodraw [1], which is great.
Mono draw is in maintenance mode and non-free. Based on the name, pretty sure that Monosketch is an explicit replacement.
Monodraw got an update the other week. It isn't being changed, but it doesn't need to.
Great little app. And it's $10, once. Hardly breaking the bank.
But it's not open, and can't be edited by those who want to. We should always support FOSS.
Absolutely we should. But this one isn't FOSS.
> Based on the name
I think in this case the name alone is not enough to suspect a replacement; perhaps it’s just a similar product in the same domain (_mono_space visual editors).
Maybe it's just more or less feature-complete? Was curious, as someone who hadn't heard of it before, so I checked the blog. Last post is from April last year and concerns public testing of a new release. That's not particularly old, if you ask me?
Oh nice, this is going in the tool belt. Simple and self-explanatory. Hits the same notes as excalidraw.
Only thing I couldn't figure out right away is how to copy the drawing itself (not the JSON data). Eventually I found cmd+shift+c in the keyboard shortcuts. Bit later I found 'Export Text' by clicking on the project name (default: 'Undefined').
I'd put that functionality a bit more front-and-center
Same for me. Add a 'paste text to clipboard'-button top center.
OFF TOPIC, but, on topic, I decided to goof with playscii yday. It is a powerful little thing, but will take some time for me to get comfortable.
"Playscii is an open source ASCII art and animation program. It runs on Windows, Linux, and macOS."
- https://heptapod.host/jp-lebreton/playscii
Good little interview I found with the creator, JP LeBreton (legend, but I didn't know!)
https://cheesetalks.net/jplebreton.php
> As far as tooling limitations, GZDoom is not a bed of roses. Very little in the engine is runtime editable, so you have to reload the engine to see any of your changes. A rapid turnaround time for reloading changes is nice but it's far better to have as much as possible live-update. And ideally, in my opinion, you have the editor built into the engine itself, and you can do much of what you need from there without having to jump around to outside programs. Playscii was my first big attempt to build a little environment like that, something you can think in once you learn it well enough, like a musical instrument. Miles to go but that's always where I'm trying to get to.
> "I'm passionate about creating ASCII graphs ..."
I wonder if this guy is like me, around my age. I was around at the "beginning" of the world wide web, and I absolutely love 8-bit graphics, ASCII art, etc., the simpler the better; probably because it brings me back to the heyday, the wild west of the internet. I really miss those days. :-(
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't just cut and paste it and easily edit it. At that point it might as well be any file format rendered as an image.
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.
Lovely idea! You're going to be fighting against editors and linters but it'd be a very cool proof of concept.
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
There’s also https://github.com/casparwylie/cascii-core.
I like it! I really like that the lines stick to the boxes but it's a bit hard to make them stick.
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.
It's not an ascii renderer, but a ascii diagram drawing tool
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 there any way to make images accessible other than the alt tag? I'm sure SVGs are more machine-readable, but how would that help vision-impaired folks?
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".
Good reminder to keep in mind.
At the same time, I don't think one should necessarily limit your expression based on constraints like accessibility.
Hook up to svgbob[1] and bob is your uncle (pun intended).
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 ;-)
https://github.com/jlongster/tigma there is also this
Laughed at the default text value. What track's that from?
This is really cool. Better than draw.io and excalidraw
I'm a huge fan of asciiflow, this is better!
Is it easy to write a renderer in another program? Do people still say lazyweb?
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
We used QBasic, but I don't recall what version (maybe 4.5?). Codepage 437 looks similar to what I recall seeing, though.
Seeing projects with first commits from 3-4 years ago feels like finding pre nuclear testing steel. No strong proof exists that this project was not conceived as slop.
finally!
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.