Plotille: Plot in the terminal using Braille dots

github.com

40 points·tosh··11 comments

The problem with using braille characters is the spacing which leaves to uneven distribution of "pixels". This could be improved by using octants, which will be included in Unicode 16.

https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/Unicode-16.0/U160-1CC00.p...

I don't see a completely filled in octant. What character should be used for that?

I think U+2588 Full Block would work?

U+2588

With the right font (e.g. http://viznut.fi/unscii/) and line spacing, braille characters work fine with an even distribution of pixels and no gaps.

That's pretty cool. Are there any terminals that ship with such a setup? Better yet, is it possible to override this behavior in your app? For example, could I make a TUI app specifically for plotting data, and have it select it's own font that's optimized for braille plotting?

The new Cascadia Code update has both braille and octants. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/cascadia-code-240...

Worked with this a bit but since it is very basic and unmaintained I've changed to plotext (https://github.com/piccolomo/plotext)

Neat. But why reinvent a bad version of matplotlib when all you need to make is an MPL backend? Is it very hard to make a backend?

I think matplotlib's overwhelming API surface motivates a lot of work in the plotting space. I personally find that I need to relearn/recopy the API every time I need to use it, and I could never whip something up on a whim.

I actually use youplot[1] for this very reason so I can pipe small datasets into an exploratory visualization straight from the command line.

[1]https://github.com/red-data-tools/YouPlot

Or just show your matplotlib plots directly in the terminal: https://github.com/jktr/matplotlib-backend-kitty

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