ascdraw: Editor for ASCII/UTF-8 diagrams (in 144FPS)
github.comThis is cool and reminds me of the old ascii art editors; although this appears more geared towards technical documentation than art.
Not sure why the title has to mention 144fps, which is of course dependant on the computer specs, the terminal emulator, and the screen rendering the program... If you've got a problem rendering ascii fast, I got news for you...
Well it isn't that simple :)
It mentions 144FPS, because of scrolling/zooming events.
If there's a key-by-key panning then probably you need 1 frame and you're good. Macbook's Pro touchpads generate events with 150hz - and in order to maintain "butter smooth" FPS has to follow.
Number of cells on screen matters: rendering 80x80 is not a problem. After zooming out and 1000x1000 on screen panning with 150FPS is straightfoward.
In the end there is a deterioration of user experience when jank in scrolling, zooming and even typing happens.
Thus ceiling right now is around 144FPS, mostly because ~6ms budget (on M2 Macbook and 4K 144hz display). 60hz refresh rate 60FPS is an easy mode ;-)
You certainly will have a problem rendering ascii fast in lots of terminals if you keep re-rendering things that haven't changed, though, so I hope that's not what they mean by giving FPS numbers
This is very cool.
If you can record some gif and embed it in the README.md, it'd be better
Good idea, haven't thought about this before.
This feels a lot like what I've been wanting for sketching hardware ideas. Gonna spend some time with this. Nice work!
effect of accidental development of a framework for GUI apps and personal sympathy toward diagrams
This is very cute! What kind of creations are you making with this? The examples show some loose diagramming, but the infinite canvas to me screams idea scratch pad?
It's infinite canvas, so I'm actually drawing diagrams for code, for LLMs (those are much more receptive to text diagram than screenshots).
Scratchpad is default mode but it can edit text files, or have own files for editing. One more magical use case is filter mode when using CLI agents. Switch prompt to editor, select some text I want to be laid out, I filter through `ascdraw -` which opens editor, let's me move things around, align, add arrows & stuff and then after closing I get selected text in a new form.
Anybody did transpile it to C with the microsoft rust to C transpiler?