AsciiDraw

Draw diagrams with your mouse. Get plain text back.

Documentation · Download

---

AsciiDraw is a cross-platform desktop app for creating text-based art — diagrams, flow charts, and layouts made of Unicode box-drawing characters. Sketch like in any vector editor; export plain text that fits anywhere a monospace font lives: source code comments, documentation, commit messages, chat.

┌───────────┐
│   Hello   │──────┐
└───────────┘      │
                   ▼
             ┌────────────┐
             │   World    │
             └────────────┘

Features

• Two simple elements — rectangles (with text, borders, fills, alignment) and orthogonal lines (with arrowheads). Text boxes are just borderless rectangles.
• Smart connectors — lines snap to eight connection points per rectangle and stay attached when shapes move or resize, re-routing with the minimum number of segments.
• Three line weights — Normal ─, Bold ━, and Double ═, with correct junction characters where they cross (┿ ╪ ╂ ╫ ╬).
• Layers & groups — restack elements by dragging in the layers panel, group shapes to move them together.
• Full editing — move, resize, multi-select, undo/redo, keyboard nudging, zoom.
• Export anywhere — copy to clipboard, or save as .txt, .svg, .png. The native .asciidraw format is readable JSON.
• Native & portable — compiled ahead-of-time with no runtime to install, for Windows, macOS (Intel & Apple Silicon), and Linux.

Install

Grab the package for your platform from the latest release, unzip, and run AsciiDraw.

Build from source

Requires the .NET 10 SDK:

git clone https://github.com/michaelliao/asciidraw.git
cd asciidraw
dotnet run

Releases are published by the GitHub Actions workflow on v* tags, which builds NativeAOT binaries for all platforms.

Documentation

The full guide — tools, connection points, style merging, shortcuts — is at asciidraw.puppylab.org.

Tech

Built with Avalonia and rendered with the bundled Maple Mono typeface, so the canvas and every export line up character for character.