Awesome. This is a great addition to the plaintext arsenal (which includes Markdown and Textile).

I'd like to see a superfluous extension/hack of this to be able to produce art and cool-looking things in general, a la pixmaps: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_PixMap

Neat, although I was hoping this was going to create ascii diagrams from a GUI editor.

Edit: might be a good feature for this project

Emacs's artist-mode (mentioned in another of the comments here) offers something rather like that.

There is also an ASCII drawing tool for Vim, FWIW.

http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=40

This guy has integrated it with org-mode for Emacs: http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html#sec-13.1

Hrm....

    M-x artist-mode-render-buffer

Oh sweet! Now we just need emacs to render the ascii art when displaying it in a code comment, similar to what the AUCTeX latex-mode does for equations.

the "why" section seems reasonable to me. particularly as a wiki macro.

it still makes me say "ugg". making a diagram in text is like writing code in ed.

There are many reasons to use text for diagrams:

* universally editable forever

* diffable version control

* can be included with source code documentation/comments

* full gamut of unix tools available: you can grep for labels, do regex replace with sed, etc

* automation -- anything text-based is inherently scriptable

Especially diffable version control! Better than adding an image for code documentation. Although SVGs are also decent in this regard, they'd be slightly overkill.

this seems like it would take far more time than just purchasing a copy of omnigraffle and saving a file.

On the other hand, it might be easier and cheaper than purchasing a Mac and a copy of OmniGraffle. And you have to admit, it's a pretty lovely hack.