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by dspillett 1594 days ago
I've seen this a few times. The key limit is that once drawn the characters are set, you can't move the drawn objects around.

What I'd like is something like drawio for ASCII/Unicode. I've been thinking of writing my own for years, but that'll probably never happen so I'll just keep mentioning the idea when similar apps come up in the hope I inspire someone else!
3 comments
junon 1593 days ago
Hey, maintainer here (sorta). We've both been super absent the last few years unfortunately but this was ultimately on our list for V3.

Now I just need to find some spare time...

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taterbase 1594 days ago
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding you but this tool expressly has a select and move tool.
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eenell 1594 days ago
You can drag edges, but it doesn't seem to have a concept of a "square" beyond the tool itself. So after you've placed it, you can't move individual shapes around. The select works more like a text-editor's highlighter than something like the lasso tool in draw.io
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dspillett 1594 days ago
It does, but that selects and moves the cells not the objects and then redraws the cells? Actually, going back to have a play I see that it does allow some modification of existing objects but it isn't terribly flexible.

I've just done a quick search and found one that I've not spotted before, which is a bit closer to what I want in that one respect, but not nearly complete overall (and not seen a check-in in 8 years): https://textik.com/ - that might illustrate the key difference that I see missing in asciiflow.

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lijogdfljk 1594 days ago
If i understand you, the Mac-only Monodraw handles this fine. It lets you draw objects, point to objects (say like a diagram), and then move them around with the pointers auto adjusting to remain correct.

It's a shame that it's mac only.

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dspillett 1594 days ago
> It's a shame that it's mac only.

Yeah, that looks to fit the bill nicely but is no use to me with my current mix of operating systems.

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anonymous_they 1594 days ago
It's a little tedius, but you can highlight sections and then drag the highlighted section around.

Also it would be nice to have some way of snapping boxes to a grid. Similar to creating new elements in figma. It was hard to tell when if all the boxes I made were aligned / same size.

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