A TUI software to draw basics ASCII diagrams.

Introduction

A minimalist and lightweight ascii diagram editor working with ncurses.
It features an easy to use interface for drawing rects, lines, arrows, text...
and doing things such as copy-pasting, filling selection...
It's written in C because first I like C, C is beautiful, C is simple,
C's memmory management is challenging and it compiles fast.

This project is not intended to be a good text editor but a good ascii diagram drawer.
Even if I'm trying to improve the TEXT mode as much as possible :)
The main purpose of this project is to help writing documentation for devs
but it can also be used to draw a tui-videogame map!

The project support LUA scripting (scripts are in ~/.tui-diagdrawer)
and if you run make install it will install a demo script.
Be careful if you want to use plugins written by someone else!
The sandbox is not done yet!

How to use

How to setup

To install dependancies (ncurses and Lua):

• sudo apt-get install libncurses5-dev libncursesw5-dev
• curl -R -O http://www.lua.org/ftp/lua-5.4.0.tar.gz
• tar zxf lua-5.4.0.tar.gz
• cd lua-5.4.0
• make
• make install

To build the project:

• git clone git@github.com:Fran6nd/tui-diagdrawer.git
• cd tui-diagdrawer
• make
• ./tui-diagdrawer myfile

To install:

• sudo make install

Common operations

• [tab]: enter/exit the menu.
• [ctrl] + [u]: undo.
• [ctrl] + [r]: redo.
• [arrow]: move the cursor.
• [ctrl] + [arrow]: move the cursor faster.

Contributing

Any contribution is appreciated to improve the software's capabilities/architecture
In case af style changes, of course it's welcome but do not forget to explain why :)

TODO

• Multiple files editing.
• Finding words, chunk...
• Display strings bigger than screen in help viewport.
• Improve the text editor.
• Better sandbox for LUA scripts.
• Enable the user to change the name of the outpout file.
• Better Lua errors handling (avoid segfault if args not ok).
• Capability to override existing built-in edit modes.

Here is what we can do:

 | +-----------+
 | |rects      |-------+
 | +-----------+       |
 |                     |
 | lines:              |
 |  |   |              |
 |  |   |              |
 |  |   |<---arrows----+
 |  +---+
 |
 |  fill:
 |  **********
 |  **********
 |  **********
 |  **********
 |  copy past:
 |  ********** ********** **********
 |  ********** ********** **********
 |  ********** ********** **********
 |  ********** ********** **********
 +-----------------------------------+

And an example diagram I made for another project.

                     +-----B-West to A----+   +---A-East to B-------+
                     |                    |   |                     |
              |      V      |             |   |              |      V      | 
 edge  0  <---| +---------+ |--->edge 0-------+  edge  0 <---| +---------+ |--->edge  0
 edge ... <---|-| BRICK A |-|--->edge ... |      edge ...<---|-| BRICK B |-|--->edge ...
 edge  n  <---| +---------+ |--->edge n   +------edge  n <---| +---------+ |--->edge  n
              |             |                                |             |
              |             |                                |             |
              |             |                                |             |
              |             |                                |             |
          WEST SIDE     EAST SIDE                        WEST SIDE     EAST SIDE