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.
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
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
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 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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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 ;-)
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!
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.
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
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
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?
For a native macOS app, there is also Monodraw [1], which is great.
[1] https://monodraw.helftone.com
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.
> 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?
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_character
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combining_character
There’s also https://github.com/casparwylie/cascii-core.
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
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).
[1] https://ivanceras.github.io/svgbob-editor/
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
https://github.com/jlongster/tigma there is also this
I like it! I really like that the lines stick to the boxes but it's a bit hard to make them stick.
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 ;-)
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!
finally!
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
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.