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There are a number of ASCII/ANSI-art specific editors that allow moving arbitrary rectancular chunks of text in any direction.

Classic example is TheDraw (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheDraw) which dates from 1986.

I used to use TheDraw all the time to make screens for games, my bbs, and just general stuffing around! Is the author still around? Would love to send him a belated registration fee!

Couldn't find any social media links for them, but they are on LinkedIn if you do a bit of Google searching.

Nothing compared to http://sexchart.org/sexchart.9.43

Plain text rulez http://textfiles.com/100/whytext.oct

Ever taken a look at the ASCII/ANSI art from the likes of ACiD and iCE from that era? :-)

Some galleries/samples here:

http://www.acid.org/

http://www.ice.org/

Bit of a nostalgia trip if you ever dialled into a BBS.

Now a days at least there are apps to do this. There's https://monodraw.helftone.com/ for example, although I never used it.

The hard part is laying out the planar graph, not laying out boxes.