Show HN: Spongedown

http://ivanceras.github.io/spongedown-editor/

by ivanceras • 9 years ago

64 28 9 years ago

ivanceras.github.io

jbob2000• 9 years ago

This is cool, but why would I want to draw diagrams like this? There's a plethora of tools out there that make drawing diagrams pretty simple, why do I want to do it with text? I'd drive myself crazy - every time you change one character in the diagram, you have to shift all the other characters on the line.

I don't mean to be condescending, but.. whyyy? It just seems so fragile to be doing complex diagrams in plain text like that.

scardine• 9 years ago

While ascii art is not easy to edit (it is simple enough for many uses) it shares all other advantages of readable plain text formats.

I loved it.

gravypod• 9 years ago

If you made a Spongedown vi/emacs/nano editor that had paint-like features (place speech bubble, place resistor, place trace, place line, etc) then this would become practical.

Jach• 9 years ago

http://asciiflow.com/ is invaluable for some pretty quick ASCII diagramming that I can paste into source code or chat or wherever later. But I like that they don't have a billion charting components, it keeps things simple, and if I want it to actually look nice for a presentation or long-living documentation I'm going to use a real charting/diagramming tool... svgbob is neat but I can't imagine a situation where I'd want an ASCII circuit diagram vs a shot of one from a tool like Eagle.

ivanceras7• 9 years ago

This is inspired by my first project when I was still a student(2002's). One of my professor wanted to have an application that does a question and answer test for his electric/electronic class. He wanted to fit on a floppy disk, and can be distributed to all of his students. The questionnaires was then encoded in plain text and I made a parser to go through each of the questions and their corresponding choices/answer. I skipped on questions that has diagrams and figures, since the program will only run on the terminal and I don't know any simple document formats at that time.

fimdomeio• 9 years ago

I do ascii diagrams all the time. I use Monodraw for that. From a design point of view the restrictions it imposes also create a consistent look and feel. Everything is aligned to a grid, boxes arrows, text. I never lose any time trying to make things look good as I would with another tool. Also there's the added bonus that since I'm the only one using it amongst the people I work with. When anyone sees it they know... it's a technical drawing from that guy.

yoz-y• 9 years ago

I could understand this as an interchange format. However for it to be really useful it should be accompanied by a GUI tool that allows you to only draw diagrams which are unambiguously representable as ASCII. Then you could use the tool to draw comfortably and only use the text as an evergreen format.

simlevesque• 9 years ago

Takes 10 seconds to load on a Xeon...

bobinatorino• 9 years ago

Really, really, slow. Crashed my computer. Interesting idea, though.

ivanceras7• 9 years ago

I've really wanted to put up a server to the rendering api on the server side, but I don't have to resources for it yet, so I leverage on doing the rendering on the client side.

nicoritschel• 9 years ago

Probably a great candidate for some FAAS (AWS Lamda, Google Cloud Functions)

peternicky• 9 years ago

When you say "resources", do you mean money or time?

exikyut• 9 years ago

I get

  Uncaught RangeError: Maximum call stack size exceeded

after about 30 seconds.

Ezhik• 9 years ago

Really don't find ASCII -> Diagrams very useful, but I'm surprised this is the first time I've seen inline CSV rendering like that.

ivanceras7• 9 years ago

The csv rendering isn't a standard in markdown, but I just think it would be nicer to have it render same as the table, since csv is a readable plain text format.

notheguyouthink• 9 years ago

I like them personally (ASCII Diagrams), but creating them is very difficult. I'm rarely concerned with getting them to other formats, my goal when creating them was a text representation.

I use Monodraw to draw mine, fwiw. It also outputs images/svg/etc if you like.

lonesword• 9 years ago

Does not look good on mobile browser

tenryuu2• 9 years ago

Unsure what you did wrong, but this took about a minute to process the panel on the right, before firefox crashed, taking the whole system with it.

Had to hard reset on from the physical button

From my phone camera; https://my.mixtape.moe/rkoydo.jpg

segf4ult• 9 years ago

This also crashed firefox on Linux for me.

ivanceras7• 9 years ago

I also experience crashes from time to time. The project is compiled into webassembly(wasm), and I think the wasm has yet to be tested more with bigger code base.

mishoo• 9 years ago

+1, but I tried patiently to move the mouse over the X (close tab button) and clicked a few times... one minute later it closed and I got away without a hard reset.

xnxn• 9 years ago

I liked this a lot. It was fun pasting some of my diagrams in to see how svgbob rendered them.

I think I still prefer a monospaced font in the SVG (but that's easy to do with CSS).

ivanceras7• 9 years ago

The shapes on the svg is adjusted to fit with source diagrams I've found anywhere online. If you have some interesting diagrams that are a bit off on the render, please don't hesitate to show it, or file a bug on the github repo.

wjvdhoek• 9 years ago

This is awesome, great job!

Show HN: Spongedown

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