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  • Hacker News
  • It is convenient to draw flow chart or architecture of something using vim and just ASCII
    by lilerjee
  • You can use artist mode in Emacs as an equivalent. It's really great for box plots and diagrams.
    by jmercouris
  • I know that AI will never replace me until it can generate ASCII art. So far it seems to struggle so I sleep well at night.
    by newsomix9xl
  • True terminal art connoisseurs are still using their registered copies of TheDraw from 1991:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheDraw

    by lee_ars
  • Visual block mode and virtual edit are such killer features of vim.

    I also like plugins like https://github.com/nvim-mini/mini.move That allows you to move selected characters around; it's super useful to correct mistakes or reorder things quickly, and it's also very intuitive to make ASCII art with it!

    by qiine
  • > It's also totally valid to not use this feature and just fill the buffer with spaces at the beginning of your session instead; just know that in Vim it's not absolutely necessary.

    I actually set up a script to fill a temp file with a page worth of some "background" character and then open it with a special vimrc (mostly oriented around making it so that mouse drags use visual-block mode regardless of what mode I was in before).

    by zahlman
  • Awesome! I added your blog to the docs for an ascii art color syntax I wrote for my vim-like editor, I'd love if you checked it out

    https://civboot.github.io/lua/asciigame.html

    Note: right now the editor crashes if you mis-type any of the syntax... it's not really fully launched, going to fix that soon hopefully but you can see a [screenshot](https://civboot.github.io/img/asciigame.png) of what it looks like

    Also, if you know any other good references for getting into asciiart I'd love to reference them as well.

    Note: the Ele editor isn't _quite_ ready for all the asciiart features in your blog post, notably virtualedit and macros are not implemented yet - but I just added basic visual mode so it's getting close!

    by vitiral
  • Another slew of utility lies in `:help searchoffset`, often like the following: https://til.codeinthehole.com/posts/about-vims-semicolon-sea...

        /x/e-3
    /x/+1
    /x/;/yz
    ...it allows near arbitrary cursor placement (eg: this blog articles "squiggle" situation) to be able to find the beginning of the squiggle, or the end of the squiggle (or temporarily using "X" and "Z" for start/end, and "clearing" it with `V...:s/[XY]/./g`
    by ramses0
  • Love it, this was new to me
    by JSR_FDED
  • For the last example given in that article:

        /test_.*_errors/;/errors
    I find it much easier to use "\zs". That tells vim where you want the "start" of the match to be. Everything before the "\zs" is just treated like context:

        /test_.*_\zserrors
    It is also useful for ":s/match/sub"
    by sudobash1
  • > When asked, "do you need any special programs or software to make ASCII Art?", the great ASCII artist Joan G. Stark said: "All you need is a text editor with a fixed-width font."

    You can find her impressive ASCII art archived at

    https://web.archive.org/web/20091028031724/http://www.geocit...

    by tromp
  • Neat. The quick and dirty way I use if I want to make something big and unmissable is to invoke figlet inside vim: ":r!figlet vim"
    by tjoff
  • Glad I'm not the only one who does this.
    by jrop
  • Ha! Never looked into :r, but I certainly will now
    by lachlan_gray