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vitiral
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!

newsomix9xl
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.
ramses0
Another slew of utility lies in `:help searchoffset`, often like the following: https://til.codeinthehole.com/posts/about-vims-semicolon-sea...

    /x/e-3
    /x/+1
    /x/;/yz
...it allows near arbitrary cursor placement (eg: this blog articles "squiggle" situation) to be able to find the beginning of the squiggle, or the end of the squiggle (or temporarily using "X" and "Z" for start/end, and "clearing" it with `V...:s/[XY]/./g`
JSR_FDED
Love it, this was new to me
sudobash1
For the last example given in that article:

    /test_.*_errors/;/errors
I find it much easier to use "\zs". That tells vim where you want the "start" of the match to be. Everything before the "\zs" is just treated like context:

    /test_.*_\zserrors
It is also useful for ":s/match/sub"
qiine
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!

lilerjee
It is convenient to draw flow chart or architecture of something using vim and just ASCII
tjoff
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"
lachlan_gray
Ha! Never looked into :r, but I certainly will now
jrop
Glad I'm not the only one who does this.
zahlman
> 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).

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