Well, as a matter of fact, there is! One such language is one I have been working on for a while called V.

Under the hood, V is just vim, but all of the keystrokes are run automatically, and the contents of the vim buffer are printed to STDOUT when the program is over. This just makes running it more convenient.

Some history on the language. When I started using the vim text editor for code-golf, I discovered that it's actually pretty good at it, but has some annoying features that make it more difficult to compete it. For example, you can set up a "while loop" of sorts by doing

qq<foobar>@qq@q

which will repeat <foobar> until an error happens. This has 7 bytes of boilerplate code. In V, this is shortened to ò<foobar>ò.

Some of the things that make V great for ASCII-art:

• It is 2d by nature. One feature is that is has a "cursor" position, where most of the commands do something based on where the cursor is in the text. The other commands move the location of the cursor. For example, x deletes a single character, but Wx moves forward a word and then deletes a character. Since most other languages are not intentionally 2 dimensional, this offers a nice edge when the challenge is about positioning text in 2D space

• It is entirely string based. You can use some mathy operations, but these are usually the longer way to achieve things.

• It uses regex compression to quickly change text.

• All of it's internal memory, which is just a 2d array of characters, is implicitly printed when the program ends. Additionally, all inputs is implicitly added into it's internal memory, which is nice when most of the challenge is about changing the input in a certain way.

So I really enjoy using this language, and if you are looking for a specifically ascii-art language, I highly recommend it. However, I would also give a few disclaimers.

• It is very confusing to learn. It's also very powerful, but because it's based on a very popular text editor that is 30 years old, there are lot's of obscure features that could very easily confuse new users.

• Even though it is better at handling numbers than vim, it's number support is still not great. Personally, I think this makes it more fun to work in (kind of like using retina for tasks regex was never intended for). :D

• It is still a WIP. There are some bugs, and some things I haven't gotten around to adding yet.

• It doesn't have very many users. (Current number of users: 1).

If you are interested in learning more, here are some good resources:

• A chat room where I would be happy to answer any questions you have, and help explain how it works to you.

• A tips thread for golfing in vim, but most of the tips carry over.

• A meta post describing V in some more detail.

Well, as a matter of fact, there is! One such language is one I have been working on for a while called V.

Under the hood, V is just vim, but all of the keystrokes are run automatically, and the contents of the vim buffer are printed to STDOUT when the program is over. This just makes running it more convenient.

Some history on the language. When I started using the vim text editor for code-golf, I discovered that it's actually pretty good at it, but has some annoying features that make it more difficult to compete it. For example, you can set up a "while loop" of sorts by doing

qq<foobar>@qq@q

which will repeat <foobar> until an error happens. This has 7 bytes of boilerplate code. In V, this is shortened to ò<foobar>ò.

Some of the things that make V great for ASCII-art:

• It is 2d by nature. One feature is that is has a "cursor" position, where most of the commands do something based on where the cursor is in the text. The other commands move the location of the cursor. For example, x deletes a single character, but Wx moves forward a word and then deletes a character. Since most other languages are not intentionally 2 dimensional, this offers a nice edge when the challenge is about positioning text in 2D space

• It is entirely string based. You can use some mathy operations, but these are usually the longer way to achieve things.

• It uses regex compression to quickly change text.

• All of it's internal memory, which is just a 2d array of characters, is implicitly printed when the program ends. Additionally, all inputs is implicitly added into it's internal memory, which is nice when most of the challenge is about changing the input in a certain way.

So I really enjoy using this language, and if you are looking for a specifically ascii-art language, I highly recommend it. However, I would also give a few disclaimers.

• It is very confusing to learn. It's also very powerful, but because it's based on a very popular text editor that is 30 years old, there are lot's of obscure features that could very easily confuse new users.

• Even though it is better at handling numbers than vim, it's number support is still not great. Personally, I think this makes it more fun to work in (kind of like using retina for tasks regex was never intended for). :D

• It is still a WIP. There are some bugs, and some things I haven't gotten around to adding yet.

• It doesn't have very many users. (Current number of users: 1).

If you are interested in learning more, here are some good resources:

• A chat room where I would be happy to answer any questions you have, and help explain how it works to you.

• A tips thread for golfing in vim, but most of the tips carry over.

• A meta post describing V in some more detail.