Coder of Salvation™   — programming / opensource / console / minimal

Getting ideas across by emailing ascii graphs using unix tree

Problem

A picture is worth a thousand words. At the same time: there are many techpeople who prefer to write text instead of creating pictures. But how much does one need to get an idea across?

Ultimate laziness: directories and symlinks!

Directories and symlinks are easy for people to manage. There's this unix utility called tree which is available on almost every platform.

That's it! Just copy/paste the output of tree into your email client, and set the font to 'Fixed-width'. Done!

Does this work on our forum/webchat as well?

See for yourself by copy/pasting this:

db
├── colors
│   ├── green
│   └── nongreen
└── person
    └── type
        ├── alien
        │   └── colors -> db/colors
        ├── female
        │   └── colors -> db/colors
        └── male
            └── colors -> db/colors

Background thoughts

Where do text and pictures meet in the middle?

+---------------+
|   Ascii art!  |---------> is laborous to write or mousedraw manually!
+---------------+

Therefore generating it from the unix commandline, without exotic tools is attractive.

Optionally one could even supply a bash oneliner in the email or post to your collegue can easily reproduce it.

There are many tools out there!

Don't get me wrong here. I love solutions like graphviz, gnuplot and mscgen and flowchart apps. However tree would make a great balance between laziness and constructiveness.