This is really neat. I just added beautiful-mermaid [0] support to Orange Juice [1] because there is no way to display images on this site, even from an extension (due to their aggressive CSP lockouts). But I can render text->SVG and mermaid doesn't look awful just typed out, but anyone who has the extension installed is leveled up. Is there something like this running as a library that I can also add?

[0] https://github.com/lukilabs/beautiful-mermaid

[1] https://oj-hn.com

  <mermaid>
  flowchart TD

  %% Power Side (240V)
  subgraph Power Circuit (240V)
    Breaker["240V Breaker / GFCI"]
    Fuses["Fuse Block"]
    Contactor["4-Pole Contactor"]
    Pump1["Pump 1 (240V)"]
    Pump2["Pump 2 (240V)"]

    Breaker --> Fuses
    Fuses --> Contactor
    Contactor --> Pump1
    Contactor --> Pump2
  end

  %% Control Side (120V)
  subgraph Control Circuit (120V)
    Hot120["120V Control Hot (tap)"]
    AirButton["Spa Air Button"]
    AirSwitch["Air Switch"]
    Coil["Contactor Coil (A1/A2)"]

    Hot120 --> AirSwitch
    AirButton -. air tube .-> AirSwitch
    AirSwitch --> Coil
  end

  %% Mechanical Link
  Coil -. magnetic pull .-> Contactor
  </mermaid>

Pretty cool (and the linked in the comments monodraw I’m buying today it looks great too).

I’ve actually been tinkering with a web app (as a test bed for various spec driven dev frameworks with Claude code) a wireframing tool for TUI apps. Conceptually similar to figma almost, infinite canvas and all that jazz, but has premade components for the Ink TUI library (idea would be to support a few popular TUI frameworks eventually) and you can just drag and drop and design TUI interfaces, then download the skeleton code generated by the app for the whole frame.

I don’t know how far I’m going to take it, but it works so far. A picture is worth a thousand words, a picture of word characters in a ui layout is worth something right?

I’ll probably open source it eventually, I doubt there’s much of a commercial market opportunity for it

Oh nice, this is going in the tool belt. Simple and self-explanatory. Hits the same notes as excalidraw.

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

Looks promising. Coming from excalidraw, I can't live without the numbered 1-5 shortcuts to select the tool (instead of remembering R for rectangle, L for line, ...). Also a mode to "lock in" the current tool so I can draw many rectangles back to back. Those two things would make a huge difference in how fast I can sketch things out in this.

OFF TOPIC, but, on topic, I decided to goof with playscii yday. It is a powerful little thing, but will take some time for me to get comfortable.

"Playscii is an open source ASCII art and animation program. It runs on Windows, Linux, and macOS."

- https://jp.itch.io/playscii

- https://heptapod.host/jp-lebreton/playscii

Good little interview I found with the creator, JP LeBreton (legend, but I didn't know!)

https://cheesetalks.net/jplebreton.php

> As far as tooling limitations, GZDoom is not a bed of roses. Very little in the engine is runtime editable, so you have to reload the engine to see any of your changes. A rapid turnaround time for reloading changes is nice but it's far better to have as much as possible live-update. And ideally, in my opinion, you have the editor built into the engine itself, and you can do much of what you need from there without having to jump around to outside programs. Playscii was my first big attempt to build a little environment like that, something you can think in once you learn it well enough, like a musical instrument. Miles to go but that's always where I'm trying to get to.

> "I'm passionate about creating ASCII graphs ..."

I wonder if this guy is like me, around my age. I was around at the "beginning" of the world wide web, and I absolutely love 8-bit graphics, ASCII art, etc., the simpler the better; probably because it brings me back to the heyday, the wild west of the internet. I really miss those days. :-(

There’s also https://github.com/casparwylie/cascii-core.

What's old is new again. This takes me back thirty-odd years to some ASCII drawing program I used to use in DOS. I can't recall if it was somehow part of WordPerfect or its own thing.

There is Monodraw, the best out there. https://monodraw.helftone.com/

I'd love some version of these tools that could reliably round-trip pure text. Some heuristic or model that can actually recognise boxes, lines with anchors, parent-child relationships etc, so you can paste in pure text and immediately start rearranging stuff. My experience with Monodraw was that you had to maintain the original file format to do this, so once a diagram was in a markdown file or whatever, you couldn't just cut and paste it and easily edit it. At that point it might as well be any file format rendered as an image.