asciiflow VS excalidraw

> 7. You can put them in the source where they are relevant.

> Got a hairy state machine? Stick a comment at the top with something like nomnoml's syntax and anyone can follow what's going on without having to trace through the code.

For that use-case a markup graph language is a poor solution. Use https://asciiflow.com instead to produce something that people can digest without needing a third-party tool that may not even exist anymore.

Many diagrams I am able to draw manually as I'm editing source code on emacs, but for more complicated ones I tend to use this: https://asciiflow.com . To each their own, so pick your favorite ASCII editor.

This isn't at all what you are asking for but I use it in code all the time for flow-charting logic. https://asciiflow.com/ And on the plus side, the output is very portable.

Combination of: - http://maaslalani.com/slides/ - for slides - figlet/toilet/cowsay/lolcat - for generating titles and ascii art - https://github.com/lewish/asciiflow - for charts and diagrams

So I used this website: https://asciiflow.com to draw out the diagrams and then pasted them into the LCDs using the monospace font! An LCD is 39x58 "ASCII tiles" FYI if you wanted to do this too!

AsciiFlow

ExcaliDraw

However, Notion and Obsidian can only help you write documentation. Well, how about some visuals? Let's talk about Excalidraw.

Fun fact: I used GA in Excalidraw, and it's still powering some of the interactions! https://github.com/excalidraw/excalidraw/blob/master/package...

I was happy to find out recently that there is a way to make Mermaid diagrams WYSIWYG / drag and drop editable that the open source https://excalidraw.com has and did I mention it's open source!? With a LLM, you can go full loop back to Mermaid again after a few rounds of manual editing. "What a time to be alive!"

I'm working on a personal project and found myself looking for an alternative to Postman/Insomnia this morning. This made me realize i've been using the same tools for so long for work (mobile development, finance) that this project may be a good time to try out some new things.

Here are a few tools that i've been using lately that I really enjoy:

https://pocketbase.io/ - A dead-simple self-hosted firebase/supabase-like "backend in a box" using golang and sqlite. So far i've been really impressed. I've gone the route of extending the base offering with more go code and am really enjoying the experience.

https://excalidraw.com/ - An open source whiteboarding tool. Slick to use and after learning some keybinds I've gotten pretty fast at throwing together diagrams to explain things to people on my team. The killer piece though is that the filetype is just json, so I can source control my diagrams. Even better, their "export to png" function has a box to embed the json data _into_ the png, allowing me to slap the diagram in places that only accept images (think confluence) and still be able to change the diagram later if needed. 10/10.

https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/ - Gitlab's CI/CD toolset is really impressive, and I've gotten really intimate with it's deeper features over the past year. I'd be curious though to hear from someone who's familiar with it vs it's competitors.

Sketch easy and go back to work...

https://excalidraw.com/