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I use Monodraw[0]. Best purchase I ever made.

[0] https://monodraw.helftone.com/

Other similar tools are

- https://textpaint.com/

- https://web.archive.org/web/20210503172024/https://fatiherik...

- https://textik.com/

- https://asciiflow.com/#/

- https://fsymbols.com/draw/

Pedantic note to people using 'ASCII' in this thread (although Monosketch tool does't (EDIT actually does) claim to be ASCII). It uses e.g. "◎" U+25CE BULLSEYE which definitely isn't.

And the 'ascii-driven-development' blog post mentioned downthread even uses emojis.

That circuit schematic in the header is wrong enough to look like an AI-generated hallucination of what a schematic is from the "human with extra fingers" stage of image generation. Inconsistent symbol styles, missing pin labels, a shorted capacitor in the upper-left, etc.

There's graph-easy, which generates ascii by default but can also do box chars, and even SVG and png, as well as generating graphviz and other output. It is not WYSIWIG---you feed it a description of a diagram:

   echo "[ Berlin ] -- train --> [ Bonn ] [ Bonn ] --> [ Berlin ]" | graph-easy -as boxart

resulting in

    ┌───────────────────┐
    ∨                   │
  ┌────────┐  train   ┌──────┐
  │ Berlin │ ───────> │ Bonn │
  └────────┘          └──────┘

https://github.com/ironcamel/Graph-Easy

If you use Emacs, there's a pretty nifty package https://github.com/tbanel/uniline

Tip: look into setting the value of the `spellcheck` HTML attribute/property to `false` for your element labels -- I am looking at red wavy underlines under every "GND", "uF" etc, on the [linked] front page. Spell-checking is obviously practically useless since these labels aren't meant to be spell English (or otherwise) words, I imagine.

Just used this to make a couple quick diagrams. It's easy to use and the diagrams export well. A couple suggestions for improvement:

1. When working with small rectangles, I had trouble getting the rectangle to move instead of enlarge. It looks like holding down the mouse button for a second makes moving more reliable. The UI should make it clearer what I'm actually doing.

2. If I open MonoSketch in another tab, I can't make a second diagram at the same time as the first -- there seems to be one shared context between tabs. I would like to be able to make a new diagram separate from my current one.

For a native macOS app, there is also Monodraw [1], which is great.

[1] https://monodraw.helftone.com

What is the purpose of ASCII diagramming today? Seems like graphics are supported by every document and communications medium that I use. Is it for including directly in code?

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

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. :-(

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

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.

I used a similar tool called AsciiFlow (asciiflow.com). This Monosketch seems easier to use. The best part is that we can add diagrams directly inside the source code.

Great app!

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

first: looks very cool.

now, historically, i'd look at the language choice and ask myself, "would i want to set up a JVM" to run this kotlin app? oh, it's kotlin and python and the installation happens through pipenv?

two different ideas strike me now:

1. would it be worth throwing this at an LLM and having it write it in a different language,

2. if i was just consuming a bundled binary (e.g. go or rust), would i have such reluctance?

i think distribution is becoming increasingly important, making nonsense details like pipenv and whichever version of the JVM is present much greater friction.

I love Monodraw, and use it every week

Aren't SOTA models doing this for few cents already? at least when I tell Claude to add a systems draw or arch flow to a README.md he'll do it quickly.

Already see a use for this in one of my projects. Thank you for building and making it OS!

I like it! I really like that the lines stick to the boxes but it's a bit hard to make them stick.

Looks fab. Great design.

Can it make polygons? Basically, shapes other than rectangles? If so, how? (maybe I missed it?)

this is super cool as an art form but ASCII art is an accessibility nightmare so please don't use it for docs unless you know what you're doing and have made it accessible in some other way

Hook up to svgbob[1] and bob is your uncle (pun intended).

[1] https://ivanceras.github.io/svgbob-editor/

Very nice. It would be great to see this as an Obsidian plugin.

This is really cool. Better than draw.io and excalidraw

Just my kinda thing--great stuff!

Laughed at the default text value. What track's that from?

https://github.com/jlongster/tigma there is also this

I'm a huge fan of asciiflow, this is better!

Everyone linking to their favorite tool, but wanted to point out to the OP that Monosketch looks awesome. Cool being open source as well.

Hate to be that guy, but ASCII doesn't contain box-drawing characters or arrows. I guess it's a lost cause though…

Oh look, another tool to draw ASCII boxes. Just what we needed in 2026. Next someone will tell me we can use AI to generate these too.

Is it easy to write a renderer in another program? Do people still say lazyweb?

Seeing projects with first commits from 3-4 years ago feels like finding pre nuclear testing steel. No strong proof exists that this project was not conceived as slop.

the Linux man page I have installed online says this isn't ASCII and it even made this face when I asked it O _ o

finally!

Nice project!

This pairs nicely with ASCII-Driven Development - for iterating and modifying layouts with AI.

https://medium.com/@calufa/ascii-driven-development-850f6666...