What does HackerNews think of ditaa?
ditaa is a small command-line utility that can convert diagrams drawn using ascii art ('drawings' that contain characters that resemble lines like | / - ), into proper bitmap graphics.
There is a small list (in spanish) in: https://tomatesasesinos.com/2020/06/11/anti-nocodetools-diag...
Not too long ago I had a project that was implemented as a complex state machine where the requirements kept changing, and keeping the documentation as an ASCII diagram in the source code had a couple of benefits: * It meant that the documentation could be updated when the code had to be changed * I didn't have to hunt for the diagrams on the project wiki when I made these changes. * The diagram was kept in version control with the rest of the code. Each commit/branch had a diagram that accurately reflected its state.
I could then use Ditaa to convert the diagram to a more appropriate format when updating the project's wiki or emailing the customer
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20130813045206/http://www.asciif... [2] https://github.com/stathissideris/ditaa
I've recently used this for a diagram of a FSM in software I'm developing at work.
I drew the diagrams on http://www.asciidraw.com. The diagram ends up as a comment in my source code. This has a couple of benefits: It is easy to keep up to date (I change it if I change the code), and it is under version control (so if I check out a particular branch, I don't have to struggle to find the relevant diagram). It is also not significantly more difficult to do than, say, Visio for a simple diagram like this.
I then used Ditaa to convert the diagram to an image file for more official documentation, like emails to customers etc.
emacs also has a mode for drawing ASCII diagrams, but I'm on Windows, so I can't comment about it.
(http://asciiflow.com/ seems like a nice alternative to asciidraw.com, but asciidraw is the one I started out with)
edit: there is also http://shaky.github.bushong.net/ that I use to entertain people who's seen the ditaa generated diagram.
https://github.com/stathissideris/ditaa
(SF.net lists 2011 as SVN trunk date, github lists "13 days ago")
In related work, see also my Go port at:
https://github.com/akavel/ditaa
(side by side comparison: http://akavel.github.io/ditaa/)