Heres a short post for today. A while back I remember being very excited to see that asciiflow.com had updated their platform and the tool had become far richer.
What I did not realise at the time was that the source code which once use to be available had vanished from the internet (aka github). I am not exactly sure what the motivation for this would be since its either a thinly veiled attempt to siphon up technical details from those less security concious or just a plain change of heart. Either way it left me feeling fairly disappointed in the project.
Learning to love perl - asciio
After being faced with the need to document things quickly and in an ever changing way I went on the hunt for a replacement to asciiflow and I found asciio lurking in the Fedora repositories.
I’ve been using asciio now for a few weeks and can say that this application is simply awesome! A GTK interface to interact with layer based ascii diagrams is exactly what I was after. Most particularly I can be confident that these documents stay with me and my /dev/sda.
Some assembly required
There is mostly undocumented feature in the save and save as function. That being the all documents saved with .txt extension are NOT able to be loaded as these are the ascii exports.
To save a document to reuse give it another extension. Personally I have used .asciio to keep things obvious and not had any future trouble. Details are in BZ1097538.
Happy documenting!