The ideal ascii utility?

.
No, I haven't written it, but I wonder what people would like it to do.

For example, I'd like to be able to break up a drawing into parts that I
can rearrange independently (object oriented), dragging-and-dropping
them with a mouse or cursor-keys... but if you want to move something
less than a full character-width, should it try to do
character-substitutions?  (Eg, "~-" is "-_" moved a half-space up.)

And so far I haven't liked any of the line-drawing algorithms I've
tried... do you think they can ever be useful?  To be able to use
MacPaint-like 'rubber-banding' drawing-tools (where you see the lines
grow and shrink as you move the mouse)... I'd love to see this, but I'm
not sure it could ever work well.

Or sophisticated spline tools, so you can draw curved lines by breaking
them up into segments?

So much of ascii art seems to require patiently changing one character,
and then standing back to see if it looks better.  Could you automate
just this, so that when you've clicked on a character with the 'tweak'
tool, it runs thru the likely substitutes, one at a time?  You could use
the arrow-keys to mean 'try next' or 'go back to the last'...

(I haven't done any ascii to speak of in years, because I'm waiting for
someone to write this!)


j
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