It is now on GitHub: <a href="https://github.com/stathissideris/ditaa" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/stathissideris/ditaa</a><p>I've recently used this for a diagram of a FSM in software I'm developing at work.<p>I drew the diagrams on <a href="http://www.asciidraw.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.asciidraw.com</a>. The diagram ends up as a comment in my source code. This has a couple of benefits: It is easy to keep up to date (I change it if I change the code), and it is under version control (so if I check out a particular branch, I don't have to struggle to find the relevant diagram). It is also not significantly more difficult to do than, say, Visio for a simple diagram like this.<p>I then used Ditaa to convert the diagram to an image file for more official documentation, like emails to customers etc.<p>emacs also has a mode for drawing ASCII diagrams, but I'm on Windows, so I can't comment about it.<p>(<a href="http://asciiflow.com/" rel="nofollow">http://asciiflow.com/</a> seems like a nice alternative to asciidraw.com, but asciidraw is the one I started out with)<p>edit: there is also <a href="http://shaky.github.bushong.net/" rel="nofollow">http://shaky.github.bushong.net/</a> that I use to entertain people who's seen the ditaa generated diagram.
Something that I was looking for recently, but didn't find, was a set of ASCII art "glyphs" for rendering electronic schematics.<p>I am not sure that there exists any kind of library for this, and what I have seen of such schematics (from various text files and other forms), there isn't any "one true way" to represent "standard" parts in both vertical and horizontal orientations (for some parts, it would be nearly impossible, if the goal was to represent the actual symbol using ASCII characters). Most parts are most amenable to horizontal representation only. Fortunately, many schematics can be created in such a manner.