ASCII art diagrams in Emacs org-mode
Yesterday I wrote about ASCII art diagrams and gave four reasons you might want to use this ancient approach to creating simple diagrams:
You can embed and execute source code in org-mode files. I wrote a couple posts about this, one showing how to run Python and R inside org-mode and another showing how to mix languages in org-mode. The latter shows Perl calling R and Python, all in 14 lines of code.
There are currently 39 programming languages that org-mode can call by default. In addition to conventional programming languages like the ones listed above, org-mode also supports ditaa, the language that treats ASCII art as a specification language to produce graphics.
You can edit code blocks just as you would other text in an org-mode file. But if you’d like to edit a code block in its language’s mode, type C-c ' from inside the code block. If you’re editing Python code, for example, this will open a new window, in Python mode, containing just that code block. If you type C-c ' inside a ditaa code block, Emacs opens a new window in “artist mode,” a mode specifically for editing ASCII art.
You can run code inside org-mode two ways: interactively and for export. With your cursor inside a block of code, type C-c C-c to execute the code and report the results. You can also export an entire org-mode document and have the results of code execution embedded in the final document. This works much the same as “*weave” projects like Sweave, Pweave, and Hweave. But while each of these is specific to a particular programming language (R, Python, and Haskell respectively), org-mode works with dozens of languages, including ditaa.
