I've created a web-based editor for ASCII file directory trees called asciitreeman. It's designed to make it easier to edit and reorganize the output of the tree command.
You can try it out here: https://reorx.github.io/asciitreeman/
And the source code is on GitHub: https://github.com/reorx/asciitreeman
Some of the key features include visual tree editing with drag-and-drop-like operations, real-time sync where changes are immediately reflected in the ASCII output, keyboard shortcuts for navigation (J/K or arrow keys), and auto-saving your work to local storage.
What's interesting is that I used Claude Code to "vibe-code" this project in a very short amount of time. It was a fun experiment in AI-assisted development. For those curious about the process, I've included the prompts and specifications I used in the source code. You can check them out in the spec.md and CLAUDE.md files in the repository.
Hop you find it useful!
Box-drawing characters (U+2500–U+257F) are not ASCII (U+0000–U+007F).
There, got it out of my system. :-)
(I know, “ASCII art” colloquially means more than just the ASCII range.)
I recall "ASCII art" always referring to art made with the 7-bit character set, and art made with the extended CP437 characters (and including color, etc.) always being called "ANSI art".
I think the confusion arises because the IBM PC ASCII (code page 437) included comprehensive box-drawing characters between hexidecimal character positions B3 and DA. These weren't adopted into Unicode in the same character positions, but the box-drawing characters were definitely part of the commonly understood ASCII character set.
But I think that this ASCII tree editor should have a toggle option for basic vs extended ASCII, by utilising +, -, and | characters.
Honestly I’m not even convinced it’s entirely fair to call code page 437 a superset of ASCII, with how it repurposes the control codes 0x01–0x1F and 0x7F. (Superset of printable ASCII, definitely. It just feels not quite right to call it a superset of ASCII as a whole, though it is generally considered so.)
(And I can’t find any references to code page 437 being called “IBM PC ASCII”.)
Would love to have ASCII Tree Editor on https://www.superlaun.ch
Drag-and-drop functionality was actually the first thing I considered. However, I want to keep the code clean and avoid involving too many third-party libraries. So, I came up with this method to make reordering easy while keeping it simple to implement.
I will submit it to Superlaunch, although I feel that it might not be valuable enough to be considered a product :)
Otherwise, it’s like showing assembly code for some program you wrote. No one cares about the machine code, just give the highest level language.
For your convenient, here's the link (it's written in Chinese, that what I really forget about): https://github.com/reorx/asciitreeman/blob/master/spec.md