Show HN: Cascii – A portable ASCII diagram builder written in vanilla JavaScript (opens in new tab)

One question though, how do edit the content later? For example I generated a few diagrams one at a time and pasted those in a local plain text file. Later when I want to edit a particular diagram/part, I tried copy pasted it in, but always got "cannot paste, content leaves canvas" error. If I tried copy-pasting a really small section (e.g. 3x3 table), it pasted it right in the center. Anyway, not sure if that's an intended work flow or not. Great job regardless.

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Do you know if there would be a way (in the future) to export existing image diagrams to this format / will there be an API. It would be very cool for archival purposes.

Is is possible to import and edit diagrams after they have been created?

Monodraw[1] is a similar product delivered as a standalone macOS app. It’s a classic pay once-type license and very polished software. Cannot recommend enough! I’ve always wanted something as good on Linux though, will definitely give this a go!

[1] https://monodraw.helftone.com/

One of the saddest days at my current job: when the company I’m contracted to stopped offering Excalidraw in favor of Lucid. I mostly understand the rationale, but the dramatic difference in friction basically shut down all interest I had in using diagrams to help communicate with my team members.

Since you are providing a single portable html file (which almost no one does that these days sadly) you may be interested in how sequencediagrams.org handles this. They don't offer sign up, instead have localStorage, Google drive, file export and few other ways.

Also, can you let me open it on the phone with a warning/recommendation to look at github instead of redirecting to it.

FYI there's a typo in the link in the README -- points to casci.app instead of cascii.app.

Please consider changing the link colors in the scrolling intro to yellow when in dark mode. They were really hard to make out.