64 points by rbanffy 6 hours ago | 8 comments
keyle 4 minutes ago
I'm all for it, but it's dangerously mixing ASCII with the meaning of plain-text...
ssivark 3 hours ago
Couldn't help riffing off on a tangent from the title (since the article is about diagramming tools)...

Dylan Beattie has a thought-provoking presentation for anyone who believes that "plain text" is a simple / solid substrate for computing: "There's no such thing as plain text" https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/theres-no-such-thing-as... (you'll find many videos from different conferences)

suprjami 2 hours ago
The list at the top could be longer:

- https://asciiflow.com/

- https://asciidraw.github.io/

Anybody know more?

snackbroken 41 minutes ago
D2 https://d2lang.com/ added beta support for ASCII & Unicode output last year.
suprjami 31 minutes ago
That would be interesting. I like D2 though the lack of control over the layout is a bit frustrating sometimes.
4k93n2 20 minutes ago
dlcarrier 2 hours ago
From the title, I was not expecting a bunch of extended ASCII characters.
Freak_NL 45 minutes ago
The article mentioned that the use of 'ASCII' within the context of those tools should not be seen as the limited character set ASCII. Personally, I would avoid mentioning ASCII at all.

The title just talks of plain text though, and plain text usually means UTF-8 encoded text these days. Plain, as in conventional, standardised, portable, and editable with any text editor. I would be surprised if someone talked about plain text as being limited to just ASCII.

OuterVale 3 hours ago
Unsung is one of the best little blogs around. Well worth checking out the rest of the posts.
nullhole 3 hours ago
I have a mixed opinion of unicode, but it's hard not to love the box-drawing / block-element chars.
4 hours ago
edelkas 4 hours ago
[dead]