February 13, 2026
Drama in plain text
Monosketch
Fans crown a “text art” hero while rivals, feature requests, and puns pile on
TLDR: Open-source MonoSketch lets you sketch diagrams with simple text and promises fewer slideshows. Commenters cheered, asked for polygon support, compared it with Monodraw, draw.io, and Excalidraw, and joked about svgbob—showing text‑based visuals still spark big feelings and practical debates.
MonoSketch just dropped: an open‑source app that turns your ideas into diagrams using plain keyboard characters (aka ASCII). The dev says it’s good enough to ditch slides, and the crowd came roaring in. One admirer cooed “Looks fab,” while another immediately pressed the big question: “Can it make polygons?” Translation: rectangles are cute, but the community wants shapes, lots of them. Then came the spicy praise—“Better than draw.io and Excalidraw”—that sent eyebrows sky‑high and set the tone: bold claims, big energy.
But the comparison brigade wasn’t done. A Mac‑only camp waved the flag for the beloved Monodraw like it’s the hometown team, while tinkerers shouted “integration!” with a wink to svgbob and its cheeky “bob is your uncle” punchline. The AI‑curious piled on with “ASCII‑Driven Development”, pitching text‑diagrams plus chatbots as the future of quick iterations. And yes, folks chuckled at the site’s tiny footnote—ASCII font isn’t supported yet—because irony is alive and well. Still, the mood is clear: people love the speed and shareability of text‑only diagrams, especially for code docs and quick presentations. With an Apache 2.0 license, stars, sponsors, and pull requests are the order of the day—and the feature wish‑list is already forming.
Key Points
- •MonoSketch is an open-source ASCII sketching and diagramming application.
- •The project focuses on creating ASCII graphs and visual aids for demos and code integration.
- •Users can start with simple building blocks and apply formatting to produce polished results.
- •Example sections include client-server communication, app system diagrams, UI mockups, and presentations.
- •MonoSketch is licensed under Apache License 2.0 and welcomes contributions and support via GitHub Sponsors and Ko‑fi; ASCII font is not yet supported.