<story><title>Shaky: ASCII Diagram to PNG</title><url>http://shaky.github.bushong.net/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>davidjgraph</author><text>These ideas always seem to top HN. They are cute, but interactive diagram editors have been around a while and, unfortunately, are just faster to use and are more flexible.&lt;p&gt;Maybe it&amp;#x27;d make more sense to just have one of these tools implement export to ACSII?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mraleph</author><text>I wrote the original code (not this CoffeeScript port) so that I could create simple diagrams fast without resorting much to dragging stuff around with mouse. If you want to create a sequence of diagrams where each next one is just slightly different from the previous one then textual approach is simply superior to point-and-click style editing. Other parts of my motivation were outlined here[1].&lt;p&gt;Having this ASCII -&amp;gt; image converter also allows me to embed diagrams into blogposts &lt;i&gt;as text&lt;/i&gt; without actually making images out of them. See [2] as an example of such embedding.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;mrale.ph&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;2012&amp;#x2F;11&amp;#x2F;25&amp;#x2F;shaky-diagramming.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;mrale.ph&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;2012&amp;#x2F;11&amp;#x2F;25&amp;#x2F;shaky-diagramming.html&lt;/a&gt;
[2] &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;mrale.ph&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;2014&amp;#x2F;07&amp;#x2F;30&amp;#x2F;constructor-vs-objectcreate.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;mrale.ph&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;2014&amp;#x2F;07&amp;#x2F;30&amp;#x2F;constructor-vs-objectcreate....&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Shaky: ASCII Diagram to PNG</title><url>http://shaky.github.bushong.net/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>davidjgraph</author><text>These ideas always seem to top HN. They are cute, but interactive diagram editors have been around a while and, unfortunately, are just faster to use and are more flexible.&lt;p&gt;Maybe it&amp;#x27;d make more sense to just have one of these tools implement export to ACSII?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dr_zoidberg</author><text>I think the appeal would be that, since it&amp;#x27;s text based, it&amp;#x27;s already supported by git&amp;#x2F;mercurial&amp;#x2F;svn&amp;#x2F;name-your-vcs. A binary format would need some sort of history&amp;#x2F;diff support inside it to work well with a specific plugin for s VCS. An XML-based format would integrate well with a VCS, but you lose the clarity of the ASCII based diagrams.&lt;p&gt;It may seem &amp;quot;cute&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;toyish&amp;quot;, but I woudl try to use it before giving an opinion. I certainly did that with markdown and ended up moving a lot of docs to that format, right in the repos with the code.</text></comment>