Unlocking Vim's Hidden Features for Creating Stunning ASCII Art
Making ASCII Art in Vim
I share my personal workflow for creating ASCII art using barebones Vim, focusing on built-in features that streamline the process. I demonstrate how to move the cursor past line ends, insert text across multiple lines simultaneously, and manipulate rectangular regions with precision. I also explain how to leverage macros for repeating complex patterns and utilize mouse support for quick navigation, proving that Vim is a powerful tool for digital artists.
If you've never tried making ASCII art before, I recommend you don't read this article! You don't need any of this information to make great ASCII art.
- lilerjee
It is convenient to draw flow chart or architecture of something using vim and just ASCII
- 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!
- 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!