I wrote the original code (not this CoffeeScript port) so that I could create simple diagrams fast without resorting much to dragging stuff around with mouse. If you want to create a sequence of diagrams where each next one is just slightly different from the previous one then textual approach is simply superior to point-and-click style editing. Other parts of my motivation were outlined here[1].

Having this ASCII -> image converter also allows me to embed diagrams into blogposts as text without actually making images out of them. See [2] as an example of such embedding.

[1] http://mrale.ph/blog/2012/11/25/shaky-diagramming.html [2] http://mrale.ph/blog/2014/07/30/constructor-vs-objectcreate....