3 months ago I wanted to draw an ASCII diagram to include in some documentation at work. I found the few tools online to be insufficient, and was suprised there wasn't a more complete tool to get the job done.
Since, I've built Cascii from scratch in vanilla Javascript (I'm not an FE dev, it might be obvious...).
I hope it works alright. Please check out the live version at https://cascii.app, report problems, make diagrams to improve your code's documentation. Hope you enjoy using it.
One question though, how do edit the content later? For example I generated a few diagrams one at a time and pasted those in a local plain text file. Later when I want to edit a particular diagram/part, I tried copy pasted it in, but always got "cannot paste, content leaves canvas" error. If I tried copy-pasting a really small section (e.g. 3x3 table), it pasted it right in the center. Anyway, not sure if that's an intended work flow or not. Great job regardless.
There, all exported drawings come with a short link. This is so that months later anyone reading / seeing can edit their own copy online / keep it up to date.
You can also create an account to manage your own drawings.
Side note - when you use real pasting, it will not remember meaningful information (that's very hard to do elegantly). In your example, I'm guessing that 3x3 table you pasted in could not be properly edited like a table again. Hence, use short links so that Cascii remembers state.
Having an Import from clipboard would truly make this a remarkable app.
Monodraw[1] is a similar product delivered as a standalone macOS app. It’s a classic pay once-type license and very polished software. Cannot recommend enough! I’ve always wanted something as good on Linux though, will definitely give this a go!
[1] https://monodraw.helftone.com/
Please consider changing the link colors in the scrolling intro to yellow when in dark mode. They were really hard to make out.
One of the saddest days at my current job: when the company I’m contracted to stopped offering Excalidraw in favor of Lucid. I mostly understand the rationale, but the dramatic difference in friction basically shut down all interest I had in using diagrams to help communicate with my team members.
Do you know if there would be a way (in the future) to export existing image diagrams to this format / will there be an API. It would be very cool for archival purposes.
https://github.com/casparwylie/cascii-core
Since you are providing a single portable html file (which almost no one does that these days sadly) you may be interested in how sequencediagrams.org handles this. They don't offer sign up, instead have localStorage, Google drive, file export and few other ways.
Also, can you let me open it on the phone with a warning/recommendation to look at github instead of redirecting to it.