> When asked, "do you need any special programs or software to make ASCII Art?", the great ASCII artist Joan G. Stark said: "All you need is a text editor with a fixed-width font."
> It's also totally valid to not use this feature and just fill the buffer with spaces at the beginning of your session instead; just know that in Vim it's not absolutely necessary.
I actually set up a script to fill a temp file with a page worth of some "background" character and then open it with a special vimrc (mostly oriented around making it so that mouse drags use visual-block mode regardless of what mode I was in before).
...it allows near arbitrary cursor placement (eg: this blog articles "squiggle" situation) to be able to find the beginning of the squiggle, or the end of the squiggle (or temporarily using "X" and "Z" for start/end, and "clearing" it with `V...:s/[XY]/./g`
I find it much easier to use "\zs". That tells vim where you want the "start" of the match to be. Everything before the "\zs" is just treated like context:
Noice! :-D Never knew about that (even though it might be vim-specific), but yeah, so much easier than where I'll usually have to do some trial + error to get my cursor to land where I want it. (usually in a macro, or multi-`.` edit context).
It's one of those things you'd _never_ stumble over naturally, but once you're aware of the concept, it makes a ton of sense and you can immediately think of tons of uses for it.
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!
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!
You can find her impressive ASCII art archived at
https://web.archive.org/web/20091028031724/http://www.geocit...
I actually set up a script to fill a temp file with a page worth of some "background" character and then open it with a special vimrc (mostly oriented around making it so that mouse drags use visual-block mode regardless of what mode I was in before).
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!
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!