Asciiflow(asciiflow.com)
asciiflow.com
Asciiflow
http://www.asciiflow.com/
27 comments
(Site owner here)
Sorry that the site is down, it's hard to deal with spikes of traffic like this without over provisioning!
Just thought I would chime in, I'm working hard on a complete re-write of ASCIIFlow, killing GWT and moving to canvas + JS while keeping the ASCII look and feel, adding tools to resize things, and making the canvas size infinite and most importantly, supporting mobile!
Please get in touch if you have requests. https://github.com/lewish
Just thought I would chime in, I'm working hard on a complete re-write of ASCIIFlow, killing GWT and moving to canvas + JS while keeping the ASCII look and feel, adding tools to resize things, and making the canvas size infinite and most importantly, supporting mobile!
Please get in touch if you have requests. https://github.com/lewish
Thanks for the great tool! By the way, is there a chance you would consider setting up a custom copy of ditaa on your server? The ditaa.org server seems dead quite long already (some year at least, I think? or is it just me?), unfortunately... Also, I'm kinda working on a Go port of ditaa (https://github.com/akavel/ditaa), but it's totally work in progress still, and just one of many hobby projects I push forward only from time to time...
(random user posted the link here) While writing text file design doc I was looking for a way to create boxes and stuffs like and came across your cool site. Just want to share & bookmark it via HN. Sorry for the unexpected traffic :D Thanks for this project !
Awesome work! Have been following and using ASCIIFlow for a while now.
What was your original motivation for putting it together, did you particularly need it for your work or was it more a fun idea to work on?
What was your original motivation for putting it together, did you particularly need it for your work or was it more a fun idea to work on?
unexpected to see an old bookmark of mine here, not that it isn't a great tool! Looking forwrd to the rewrite, and thanks for making this!
Putting an informative README in your git repository seems a pretty common practice these days.
Nice, but it could be better if it allowed using Unicode box drawing characters as an option:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box-drawing_characters
Box-drawing characters wouldn't give as much of the old school curses terminal hacker vibe.
And yes I am aware that they used to use graphical box drawing chars back in the day as well, but right now it's 2014 and it's the aesthetic that counts, too.
And yes I am aware that they used to use graphical box drawing chars back in the day as well, but right now it's 2014 and it's the aesthetic that counts, too.
The name wouldn't be very appropriate, then.
Well, not exactly. For example box drawing characters are included in some extended ASCII tables: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box-drawing_characters#DOS
I don't think it won't fit the name at all as an extra feature (though it only makes sense to use Unicode for that purpose).
I don't think it won't fit the name at all as an extra feature (though it only makes sense to use Unicode for that purpose).
"Extended ASCII" is not ASCII.
It's a dated phrase referring to various one-byte-per-character encodings that include ASCII as a subset. Now that UTF-8 exists and is widely used, those encodings are useless until you decode them into Unicode anyway.
It's a dated phrase referring to various one-byte-per-character encodings that include ASCII as a subset. Now that UTF-8 exists and is widely used, those encodings are useless until you decode them into Unicode anyway.
So what? It's still called extended ASCII. The point is, using Unicode box drawing characters on that site would be appropriate.
Man, I wish I had this back in 1992 designing UIs for MS-DOS :) Very nice!
Damn, a customer. One of my final school projects in '91 was a text drawing program. Using it, I was amazed what effects I could get with text, background and foreground colours. Amongst other things it had line drawing, box fill with fg or bg colour.
Actually we made use of extended ASCII for our UI at the time ... you know, the solid bar/solid double bar, etc. So this isn't quite where we could have used it, but it's pretty close!
Ever tried Borland's Turbo Vision? It came out somewhere around that time and was absolutely fantastic.
+-------+-----------+----------------+
| Also | supercool | to draw tables |
|-------|-----------|----------------|
| id | yeah yeah | this all day |
| stuff | and so on | long :) |
| time | i could do| |
+-------+-----------+----------------+ | not | as | cool | as | orgmode |
|-----------------+------------+---------+----------------+------------|
| awesome | table | drawing | speed | |
| | | | | |
| | | | awsome! | auto-align |
| | | | | |
| emacs | rocks | | good shortcuts | |
| | | | | |
| lots of exports | latex | | | |
| | html | | | |
| | text | | | |
| | and others | | | |
yeah, but... emacs. Would love something online to draw tables, though.
Hoooo, found something neat: http://www.sensefulsolutions.com/2010/10/format-text-as-tabl...
I'm going to fork this to make sure it never disappears from the intarwebs
I'm going to fork this to make sure it never disappears from the intarwebs
Given that the site is now slashdotted, can anyone please mention what it even is?
It's a Javascript version of artist mode in emacs - you can draw diagrams using ascii-art like you would in a vector design program.
I wish it was javascript!
It's a Google App Engine-based Java monster:
https://github.com/lewish/asciiflow
It's a Google App Engine-based Java monster:
https://github.com/lewish/asciiflow
Ergo it being an app that now only displays:
Over Quota
This application is temporarily over its serving quota.
Please try again later.It is GWT, so it is transpiled to JS. I remember when I first saw this project years ago, I was impressed. Back then GWT was the best choice for statically-typed, large JS project development IMO.
We just chopped GWT out of our project a month or so ago; I'll fully admit that I didn't know much about it, but every step of the way I felt like I was battling it - it ended up being easier, faster and more testable to write our own JS for the front-end.
sorry for my ignorance, but what is the practical use for this?
I do a lot of geometry related programming and the ability to add some graphic illustrations directly into the source code comes in handy every now and then.
Also, everybody needs a small ascii graphic in the output from time to time.
EDIT: Language.
Also, everybody needs a small ascii graphic in the output from time to time.
EDIT: Language.
If you have ever written a standards draft, they are exclusively in plain text.
For examples, load up http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc821.html and start scrolling.
For examples, load up http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc821.html and start scrolling.
It's a clever tool for creating Ascii art. Not for everyone, but if you've ever tried to create boxes and lines in ascii, this is a tool that makes that so much easier .
This is something I might use in source code to describe / draw the relationship between elements.
This is something I might use in source code to describe / draw the relationship between elements.
> artist mode in emacs
I'd rather see that on the front page.
Yes, like this: http://www.cinsk.org/emacs/emacs-artist.html
I'd rather see that on the front page.
Yes, like this: http://www.cinsk.org/emacs/emacs-artist.html
This reminds me of TheDraw, back in the BBS days.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheDraw
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheDraw
Try PabloDraw for a more modern version - http://picoe.ca/products/pablodraw/
Also, it seems to support multiple people drawing collaboratively via a server
Also, it seems to support multiple people drawing collaboratively via a server
I've used the multi user mode, it's extremely good.
+-------x---------------------------------------------+
| xxx |
| xxx xxxxxx xxxx |
| xx x x xx |
|xxx xxxxxx |
xx |
| xxxxx xxxx |
| xxxxxxx |
| |
+-----------------------------------------------------+
| |
| xxxxxxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxxx xx |
xx xxxxxxxxxx xxxxxx xxxx xxxxxx xxx |
| xxxxxxx xxxxx xxx xx xxx |
|xxxx xxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxx xxx xxx xxxxx |
|x xxxxx xxx xxxxx|
+-----------------------------------------------------+I used this site about 2 years ago when working on a CLI for my old company. Love it and can't wait to use it again.
edit: And we just ddos'd it.
edit: And we just ddos'd it.
The first schematic editor I ever used displayed with Regis graphics [1] on a VT125 terminal. But it only used a small subset of Regis. One escape sequence would put the terminal in a mode that mapped the 8th-bit set bytes to a bunch of arc- and line-segment glyphs that were entirely sufficient to display a circuit schematic. (And the 8th-bit clear bytes retained their ASCII encodings for labels.)
Drawing with these characters was very similar to these ascii drawings: one byte gave you a piece of a line (or an arc), and you built a grid of them. The schematic editor took a simple here's-the-grid-coordinate-of-an-element representation of the schematic, adjusted the offsets of the glyphs of that element, and built-up the grid of bytes to send to the terminal.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReGIS
Drawing with these characters was very similar to these ascii drawings: one byte gave you a piece of a line (or an arc), and you built a grid of them. The schematic editor took a simple here's-the-grid-coordinate-of-an-element representation of the schematic, adjusted the offsets of the glyphs of that element, and built-up the grid of bytes to send to the terminal.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReGIS
This is definitely a useful tool to embed diagrams on source code.
Really interested to know if you embed ASCII diagrams in your source code / store engineering diagrams in your project repos?
My take is that the closer documentation is to the code the more useful it is and more likely it will be updated. Would be great to have your feedback on a side project in this area, a chrome extension / web service to turn Umlet diagrams into SVGs when you're viewing them through GitHub. Check it out at https://github.com/CalumJEadie/umlet-github.
My take is that the closer documentation is to the code the more useful it is and more likely it will be updated. Would be great to have your feedback on a side project in this area, a chrome extension / web service to turn Umlet diagrams into SVGs when you're viewing them through GitHub. Check it out at https://github.com/CalumJEadie/umlet-github.
I shit a brick when I realized you can copy and paste entire selection areas.
I love this.
One issue: I seem to get the same behavior from "right angle" line mode and the "diagonal" line mode. I would have expected the latter to use the forward back slash characters.
One issue: I seem to get the same behavior from "right angle" line mode and the "diagonal" line mode. I would have expected the latter to use the forward back slash characters.
There is no "diagonal" line mode. You're probably confusing that with the arrow line mode.
I made the same mistake and tried multiple times because I assumed it was displaying incorrectly. I think the icon needs work.
it would be interesting if they could get a diag mode working though :)
Well, there's still JavE for those things: http://jave.de
[deleted]
Got the inspiration for some web app searching, finding, forking and tweaking: http://ozh.github.io/ascii-tables/
Aaaaaand it's down. "503 Over Quota"
Anyone have a mirror?
Anyone have a mirror?
This needs to be a google doodle.
I use this all the time for quick network diagrams when explaining things via email.
It's back up now.
great for mocking up nethack levels!