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Making ASCII Art in Vim

115 points by evakhoury

by tromp

0 subcomment

> When asked, "do you need any special programs or software to make ASCII Art?", the great ASCII artist Joan G. Stark said: "All you need is a text editor with a fixed-width font."
You can find her impressive ASCII art archived at
https://web.archive.org/web/20091028031724/http://www.geocit...

by tjoff

2 subcomments

Neat. The quick and dirty way I use if I want to make something big and unmissable is to invoke figlet inside vim: ":r!figlet vim"

by ramses0

2 subcomments

by vitiral

0 subcomment

Awesome! I added your blog to the docs for an ascii art color syntax I wrote for my vim-like editor, I'd love if you checked it out
https://civboot.github.io/lua/asciigame.html
Note: right now the editor crashes if you mis-type any of the syntax... it's not really fully launched, going to fix that soon hopefully but you can see a [screenshot](https://civboot.github.io/img/asciigame.png) of what it looks like
Also, if you know any other good references for getting into asciiart I'd love to reference them as well.
Note: the Ele editor isn't _quite_ ready for all the asciiart features in your blog post, notably virtualedit and macros are not implemented yet - but I just added basic visual mode so it's getting close!

by zahlman

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> It's also totally valid to not use this feature and just fill the buffer with spaces at the beginning of your session instead; just know that in Vim it's not absolutely necessary.
I actually set up a script to fill a temp file with a page worth of some "background" character and then open it with a special vimrc (mostly oriented around making it so that mouse drags use visual-block mode regardless of what mode I was in before).

by qiine

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Visual block mode and virtual edit are such killer features of vim.
I also like plugins like https://github.com/nvim-mini/mini.move That allows you to move selected characters around; it's super useful to correct mistakes or reorder things quickly, and it's also very intuitive to make ASCII art with it!

by lee_ars

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True terminal art connoisseurs are still using their registered copies of TheDraw from 1991:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheDraw

by jmercouris

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You can use artist mode in Emacs as an equivalent. It's really great for box plots and diagrams.

by newsomix9xl

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I know that AI will never replace me until it can generate ASCII art. So far it seems to struggle so I sleep well at night.

by lilerjee

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It is convenient to draw flow chart or architecture of something using vim and just ASCII