Great little app. And it's $10, once. Hardly breaking the bank.
I think in this case the name alone is not enough to suspect a replacement; perhaps it’s just a similar product in the same domain (_mono_space visual editors).
This pairs nicely with ASCII-Driven Development - for iterating and modifying layouts with AI.
https://medium.com/@calufa/ascii-driven-development-850f6666...
Not everything has to be done in arcane ASCII diagrams because of vibes and LLMs.
This is yet another fad destined to be forgotten.
At the same time, I don't think one should necessarily limit your expression based on constraints like accessibility.
Only thing I couldn't figure out right away is how to copy the drawing itself (not the JSON data). Eventually I found cmd+shift+c in the keyboard shortcuts. Bit later I found 'Export Text' by clicking on the project name (default: 'Undefined').
I'd put that functionality a bit more front-and-center
And the 'ascii-driven-development' blog post mentioned downthread even uses emojis.
In big ASCII letters on the landing page: Unleash your ideas with ASCII [] MonoSketch is a powerful ASCII sketching and diagramming app that lets you effortlessly transform your ideas into visually stunning designs.
:-)
You need to find the monospace whitespace characters (seems there's a few [0]). Then encode a compressed version of the logical diagram in the white space, steganography style.
Or do something with characters [1] to compress a lot of data into a tiny ball of hair at the end.
Draw.io smuggles the XML in a PNG which I've always admired.
It clicked for me once I realized you can ctrl+shift+C to copy the diagram to text, and paste in my editor! But I wonder if it would be possible to make ctrl+C copy to clipboard as ASCII? I see that ctrl+C copies the json representation of the selected objects, but surely it would be possible to maintain an internal model of copied objects, while the clipboard is always filled with usable ASCII? I think I've seen some applications do this before
aanet•1h ago
Can it make polygons? Basically, shapes other than rectangles? If so, how? (maybe I missed it?)
bargainbin•31m ago
You can theoretically have "artistic" polygons where it renders using a mixture of characters to emulate how that grid would be filled if a certain shaped was laid over it but the end result wouldn't be very functional for the purposes of diagramming.
baalimago•28m ago