ASCII Diagramming Tool

Posted on 25th November, 2010 | Tagged:

I have started to use plain text alot recently for keeping track of project TODO lists and for jotting down project documentation as it comes to mind -- but diagrams present a problem, in more ways than one:

  1. Creating and linking an external image file means introducing dependencies to your plain text document.
  2. It is not possible to update the diagram later, unless you include the source.
  3. There are no really good diagram editors in Linux ...

Well, actually Gaphor looks like it could be a good UML editor, but I couldnt get it to do what I wanted. However, whilst searching using apt-cache search:

root@dannbook:/home/daniel# apt-cache search diagram
asciio - dynamically create ASCII charts and graphs with GTK+2
autodia - generates UML diagrams from perl or C++ code
bouml-plugouts-src - UML2 tool box to specify and generate code (plugouts sources)
[...]

I took note of asciio and found out that it is actually pretty neat way to embed diagrams in plain text, although the UI is minimal and I cant currently find any documentation, it is easy enough however to just jump in and start using it (although it would be good to find out what the keyboard shortcuts are)

asciio

Screenshot of asciio

And the following is the result!

                    .---------------------------------.
                    | User clicks "FB Connect" button |
                    '---------------------------------'
                                      |
                                      v
                   .-------------------------------------.
                   | Redirect to Facebook authentication |
                   '-------------------------------------'
                                      |
                                      v
   .------------.           No  .-----------.
   | Do nothing |<-------------( Authorized? )
   '------------'               '-----------'
                                      | Yes
                                      v
                            .------------------.  No  .---------------.  No
                           ( Facebook ID in DB? )--->( Email is in DB? )---------------.
                            '------------------'      '---------------'                |
                                      | Yes                   | Yes                    |
                                      |                       v                        v
                                      |            .-----------------------. .-------------------.
                                      |            | Link Facebook account | | Register new user |
                                      |            '-----------------------' '-------------------'
                                      |                       |                        |
                                      v                       |                        |
                               .------------.                 |                        |
                               | Login user |<-----------------------------------------'
                               '------------'

Comments

Output escaping

Posted by Dan, 25th Nov 2010
Well, the result would look alot better if the characters were not escaped by Symfony ...

Interesting

Posted by Will Booth, 25th Nov 2010
This looks pretty cool. I might see about using this in my inline documentation.

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