[raman162]

I agree that ASCII-art definitely is more cenetered around the original markdown spirit but I personally struggle making my ASCII-art diagrams in Vim. Looking at the mermaid, syntax it looks like I can whip up something equivalent really quick. As a developer I also don't mind that the mermaid syntax reads like pseudocode so it's probably easy for me to digest.

[tasty_freeze]

One thing that might help is using ":set virtualedit=all". This makes all lines act as if there are unlimited spaces at the end of line. That means you can move anywhere on the screen by cursor or by clicking with your mouse, etc, and not have to worry about typing in all the padding yourself. Once you place a character at column N, it will insert spaces up to column N-1 then place the new character.

[raman162]

This is cool, didn't know about that, will try that out next time.

[dan-robertson]

Not a great answer: if you use evil-mode for emacs (eg with doom-emacs or spacemacs) you get picture-mode which can make ascii art a bit easier, and artist-mode which gives you point-and-click (or move-and-press-enter) ascii art drawing.