Box of Rain
Auto-Layouted ASCII Diagrams
Details
- External ID
- 47018675
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Box of Rain
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- Feb. 14, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 24
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.7183288409703504
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Enrichment
- Theme
- creative coding and visual experiments
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- AI feature
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- auto-layout tool for ascii diagrams
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial Creating a diagramming interface is straightforward, but developing a reliable ASCII auto-layout engine requires complex 2D graph layout algorithms and character-grid constraint solving.
What it would actually take: The core engine requires implementing directed graph layout algorithms (such as Sugiyama-style hierarchical layout or force-directed methods) adapted to a discrete integer grid. It involves custom orthogonal line-routing algorithms (like Lee's algorithm or A* pathfinding on grid lattices) with crossing minimization and edge junction logic to ensure valid ASCII box-drawing characters without overlaps.
Discussion
14 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Mermaid (for diagram rendering), Relisten (music archiving platform)
Concerns raised: Unicode character width rendering issues across browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Brave), Font substitution/fallback breaking layouts on web, Ambiguous width characters render differently by locale, Right arrow glyph breaks layouts when 2 units wide
Feature requests: Use ASCII characters instead of Unicode box-drawing characters, Change CLI system prompt to 'What do you want me to do?', Support mermaid diagram parsing/rendering
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 834 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #248 of 835 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 107 days after the earliest competitor.
- AsciiSketch a free browser-based ASCII art and diagram editor · hn · 2026-01-13 · 53 upvotes · similarity 0.76
- An ASCII 3D Rendering Engine · hn · 2026-06-20 · 211 upvotes · similarity 0.63
- Asciimap · hn · 2026-03-31 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.58
- XKCDMakie.jl · github · 2026-09-12 · 28 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- Fanfa · hn · 2025-12-04 · 154 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- ASCII pixel art editor for the terminal · hn · 2026-05-10 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- ASCII based Figma like editor · hn · 2026-01-12 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- adobe-illustrator-menu · github · 2026-09-22 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.53
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a dev tools tool for Sales yet.