For the past month I've been doing something very unnatural for myself: "throwing the first one away." Going back and rewriting an aspect of a working program just to improve one property of the code rather than the behavior: eliminating all derived data structures and re-deriving everything all the time in a performant way. The result is a simpler API that seems applicable to pixel-based editors that use proportional fonts. Basically the problem is: as you do line-wrapping on a screen, how do you deal with interactive operations like clicking at a pixel coordinate or pressing the down arrow (which might result in a scroll). These primitives seem to make the implementation fairly self-evident: https://git.sr.ht/~akkartik/lines2.love/tree/main/item/move.lua#L11-28

Really interesting! Reminds me of Befunge for some reason.

Also some talk by Alan Kay where he shows a DSL based on ASCII representations of diagrams, used for implementing a network stack. But then, if I give up the simplicity of linear chains of characters, I guess I'd go for real diagrams without the limitation of the character grid. Like @guitarvydas does.

There's no character grid here since it's a proportional font 🙂 My very simple motivation here is WYSIWYG experiences for notations like:

1
---
n+1

Or math summation notation. So there isn't a clear line here between linear chains of characters and "real" diagrams. The membrane is porous.

I immediately thought about ASCII diagrams, if the direction can be any of right, down, left, up it would make it really easy 🙂

for fun, try to use em-dashes instead of "abcdefgh" and or-bars for "ijklmn" (em-dash == minus sign that's just a bit longer and contains no white pixels at the ends of the dash -- could use minus sign as above, leaving the result looking "dashed" (as above 1/(n+1)), and "or bar" == "|"). And, try Unicode instead of ASCII --> many more possibilities (incl. arrowheads and the like). Once done, pour it through t2t (text-to-text transpilation) to transpile to LaTeX (i.e. use LaTeX as assembly code).

There's an interesting difference between what you've made, Kartik, which I would describe as a "first-person draw-er" and something like Monodraw, which I would describe as a "third-person draw-er", to borrow from video game jargon. I wonder what other ideas would support the first-person approach.

"First-person drawer" makes me think of Logo's turtle graphics. Which looks indeed much like what @Kartik Agaram is doing here.