alt.hn

7/20/2026 at 6:42:07 PM

Making ASCII Art in Vim

by evakhoury

7/20/2026 at 11:32:40 PM

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!

by vitiral

7/21/2026 at 1:49:23 AM

I know that AI will never replace me until it can generate ASCII art. So far it seems to struggle so I sleep well at night.

by newsomix9xl

7/21/2026 at 12:37:55 PM

Another slew of utility lies in `:help searchoffset`, often like the following: https://til.codeinthehole.com/posts/about-vims-semicolon-sea...

    /x/e-3
    /x/+1
    /x/;/yz

...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`

by ramses0