Today, I discovered https://cascii.app/, “…one of the few well-equipped ASCII diagram builders freely available on the internet.”
I’ve fallen in love with ASCII (Unicode) diagramming when creating the slides for my most-recent talk, From Legacy to Latest: How Zendesk Upgraded a Monolith to Rails 8.0 Overnight. For those, I used a tool called Monodraw, is most capable tool for the job that I’ve found.
How does Cascii stack up?
A key advantage is its portability: you can use Cascii directly in your browser (it’s a single HTML file, no less!) and export your drawings as URLs, making sharing, backups, and version control incredibly simple.
Additionally, it has a number of things going for it that other tools lack:
- Dark mode!
- Depth stacking and layering
- Anchor points for connection lines
- Both ASCII and Unicode modes
However, Cascii currently lacks a few features that I’ve come to depend on in Monodraw:
- Aligned text inside shapes
- Multiple shape border merging
- Shape fill opacity for overlap layering
- An arbitrary single-character pencil tool
- Visible grid and alignment snapping
Given that Cascii is open sourced, I forsee a lot of these missing features coming in the near future.