This might be an example of the old does it take longer to painstakingly solve a problem, or to create a tool to make it less painstaking?

I keep around a lot of ASCII art diagrams and charts-- some new, some carried forward from ancient times. For Aaezure Odyssey MUD, the game is played in ASCII and therefore so are all the in-game maps. In any case, sometimes there's a need to edit them by moving around regions of content. In a conventional text editor, this is a gigantic pain in the neck. Sometimes you can cheese it using special key characters with find-and-replace but it's not a great way to go through life.

I also thought that surely, there'd be an obvious choice for an already-existing text editor that supports this kind of diagramming function with moving around blocks of text. The best one I found was ASCIIFlow. I loved the UI of ASCIIFlow-- it's really cool and modern. However, it had a problem where the import/export was lossy. It'd take some characters, and replace them with other characters. Dealbreaker. Besides that, there's Emacs or vim but those tools haven't been part of my life thus far and I didn't care to investigate. And then there was one other option, Notepad++ which I knew to support column-based selections but there didn't appear to be a way to move around the blocks of text.

See I thought I could go through life without ever feeling motivated to make my own text editor. I've been liking the program, so while using it I added more features outside of what it was originally intended for-- supporting cut, paste, undo, and so forth. Besides the diagrams it's been good as a general purpose editor and I've already gotten a lot of mileage from that.

The program can be found on Github here.