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Comment by jpeanuts | Hacker News Reader

Gnuplot has an output mode - called "dumb" - that prints an ASCII plot to the terminal. See e.g. http://pastebin.com/WHcLZHPr This is very handy when running scientific codes on remote machines, and works in any terminal (not just iTerm2 like the submission).

I've been looking for a matplotlib extension to do the same thing, without success.

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Have you tried using cacaview on images? When I'm running scientific code on remote machines I use jupyter tunneled over ssh, but I assume you can't do that.

Thanks for the two(!) nice tips. Just looked at libcaca, but I'm having trouble installing on my laptop (OSX). Anyway the idea is mainly to remove gnuplot as a dependency from my scientific code; introducing a new dependency defeats the point a bit.

Jupyter would be a very nice way to interact - as you guess there are difficulties: playing well with the cluster queueing system, and currently the code is launched via an mpirun call. I'm open to suggestions.

Edit: This sounds like exactly what I need! http://ipython.org/ipython-doc/stable/parallel/parallel_intr...

You can checkout my other project https://github.com/daleroberts/tv which allows you to view images in any terminal supporting Unicode 9.0 fonts and true color. It uses GDAL for the backend which is easy to install on a Mac with:

    brew install gdal --without-python --HEAD
    pip install gdal

Matplotlib has a "sixel" backend, which can render images in any terminal supporting the necessary protocol. Might be worth investigation, if you run or can run a terminal with that support - I was surprised how many do, either out of the box or recompiled to enable it.

I've looked a bit and only mlterm seems to support it out of the box at the momement (on ubuntu at least)

Xterm need an optionnal compile switch. Vte (gnome-terminal, xfce-terminal etc..) has an unmerged patch.

It's fun to play around with

Mintty's newer versions support it natively, as do a number of Linux console terminals.

It's not as complete as matplotlib, but there is an ASCII plotting library which has a (very) similar API to matplotlib called bashplotlib: https://github.com/glamp/bashplotlib

gnuplot is very nice in working like this. I've been using a script [0] to pipe data directly.

[0] https://gist.github.com/jxy/88f2972d3994dfea06fd2d3833b7ac8a

Why wouldn't you use gnuplot? If you want a numpy interface, there's this: https://github.com/dkogan/gnuplotlib

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