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Show HN: ASCII Drawing Board (delopsu.com)

121 points by delopsu ↗ HN
I've made an ASCII drawing board. You can set any brush, canvas size, export art as a text file.

I want to keep it as manual/analog as possible, hence there is no tool for converting image to ASCII.

Prompting LLMs to draw ASCII art turned out to be a difficult task . So instead I decided to ask it make a drawing board. Wihtout coding agent I wouldn't even try myself. Although it is an interesting task, it would drift me away.

Basically it's just a drawing board with endless variations of textures and brushes: when you make large canvas and zoom out you don't see ASCII anymore, but textured drawing. E.g. this is a cat: https://x.com/delopsu_com/status/1971726204073136219, brush used: " ".

I would appreciate if you could give it a try and tell your people about it, if it's something that may be of their interest. Also please give any feedback here or on X.

turns out there is already (or is emerging) ASCII benchmark for LLMs.

24 comments

[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 46.5 ms ] thread
DamonHD
Would much prefer it to start with just printable ASCII characters in the brush (32--126) from which the output would work in more places and would be in better alignment with the name.

Having said that, yes, fun and interesting, thank you...

delopsu
It's a shame that I haven't read text above after posting (only in Edit mode).

I used asterisk after "difficult task" and in the footer — all between became italic. And also brush was cleaned out.

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jbentley1
I'm going to use this for all of my Slack replies
atum47
It could work on mobile if you work a little bit on it. Right now touch is dragging the screen
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arkensaw
This is such a great idea, well done. Congrats!
teddyh
emacs M-x artist-mode
matt3210
> So instead I decided to ask it make a drawing board

Very nice. Congrats to the coding agent which made this. Needs an undo button though!

janwillemb
Doesn't seem to work on Firefox mobile. On each stroke it only renders one "point".
doi9t
It's always nice to see new tools editing ASCII; especially when working with markdown documentation.

For those who like those types of tools, but for diagrams, there's asciiflow.com.

Good job!

jkhanlar
It appears a little buggy handling fixed width improperly, noticeably when using a mouse to write out a word, with uneven drawing, the fixed width spacing does not consistently properly match the cursor movement for some lines.
slig
Nice one, thanks for sharing! Love these simple tools that LLMs can help us ship them in no time.
andrewrn
Really fun. Perfect HN post.
47282847
Nice! Feature request: drop-down menu to select a few “popular“ brush sets.
delopsu
Just added brushes palette. So far only local. And reworked layout a bit. Hope it makes board more convenient.
kordlessagain 

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