[SLL] Character based drawing tool

[Phil Mocek]

On Fri, Mar 06, 2009 at 10:48:19PM -0800, Paul Franz wrote:
> I'm looking for a text based drawing tool that will make creating drawings like this
> easy.
> 
>       192.168.1.10  192.168.1.5
>       +----------+  +----------+
>       | Desktop  |  | Server   |
>       +-----+----+  +-----+----+
>             |             |         eth1    eth0   192.168.1.1
>             |             |         +----------+     +----------+
>             +-------------+---------| Firewall |-----| Router   |-- Internet
>                                     +----------+     +----------+

The search terms you need are "ascii art editor".

Aewan looks very capable:

<http://aewan.sourceforge.net/>
"Summary:: Aewan is a multi-layered ascii-art/animation editor that
produces both stand-alone cat-able art files and an easy-to-parse
format for integration in your terminal applications. It is
primarily designed for Linux, although it currently also compiles
under FreeBSD and possibly other *NIX systems.

"More details: Aewan is a curses-based program that allows for the
creation and editing of ascii art. The user is able to move the
cursor around the screen by means of the arrow keys and 'paint'
characters by pressing the corresponding keys. There are dialog
boxes that allow the user to choose foreground and background
colors, as well as bold and blink attributes. The user may also
select rectangular areas of the canvas in order to move, copy and
paste them. Aewan also supports 'intelligent' horizontal and
vertical flipping (e.g. converts '\' to '/', etc)."


For a less visual approach, consider boxes:

<http://boxes.thomasjensen.com/>
"boxes is a text filter which can draw ASCII art boxes around its
input text. These boxes may also be removed, even if they have
been badly damaged by editing of the text inside. Since boxes may
be open on any side, boxes can also be used to create regional
comments in any programming language. With the help of an editor
macro or mapping, damaged boxes can easily be repaired.
This is useful for making the function headers in your programming
language look better, for spicing up your news postings and
emails, or just for decorating your documentation files.

"New box designs of all sorts can easily be added and shared by
appending to a free format configuration file. boxes was intended
to be used with the vim(1) text editor, but can be tied to any
text editor which supports filters."

-- 
Phil Mocek