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Show HN: ASCII Tree Editor (asciitree.reorx.com)

30 points by novoreorx ↗ HN
Show HN: ASCII Tree Editor

I've created a web-based editor for ASCII file directory trees called asciitreeman. It's designed to make it easier to edit and reorganize the output of the tree command.

You can try it out here: https://reorx.github.io/asciitreeman/

And the source code is on GitHub: https://github.com/reorx/asciitreeman

Some of the key features include visual tree editing with drag-and-drop-like operations, real-time sync where changes are immediately reflected in the ASCII output, keyboard shortcuts for navigation (J/K or arrow keys), and auto-saving your work to local storage.

What's interesting is that I used Claude Code to "vibe-code" this project in a very short amount of time. It was a fun experiment in AI-assisted development. For those curious about the process, I've included the prompts and specifications I used in the source code. You can check them out in the spec.md and CLAUDE.md files in the repository.

Hop you find it useful!

7 comments

[ 19.3 ms ] story [ 25.0 ms ] thread
chrismorgan
I’m sure lots of people will think this, so I’ll say it—

Box-drawing characters (U+2500–U+257F) are not ASCII (U+0000–U+007F).

There, got it out of my system. :-)

(I know, “ASCII art” colloquially means more than just the ASCII range.)

novoreorx
My understanding of ASCII was influenced by tools like ASCIIDraw and ASCIIFlow, which I used them like almost 10 years ago. Inside my mind there's a voice with the same opinion of yours, but I still quite used to call plain-text drawings as "ASCII". LOL
Gormo
> (I know, “ASCII art” colloquially means more than just the ASCII range.)

I recall "ASCII art" always referring to art made with the 7-bit character set, and art made with the extended CP437 characters (and including color, etc.) always being called "ANSI art".

adi_hn07
Seems like a cool project !! Can you implement auto-parse as soon as the tree is pasted? Right now we can use arrow keys to reorder files, would love drag and drop ability for that too.

Would love to have ASCII Tree Editor on https://www.superlaun.ch

Timwi
Both your link, and the “Live Demo” link in the GitHub readme, are dead links.
deadbabe
If you vibe code a project, just share your prompts and the output they produce, no one should really care about what your specific code looks like because the prompts should generate a fully custom version of the same app from scratch.

Otherwise, it’s like showing assembly code for some program you wrote. No one cares about the machine code, just give the highest level language.