Histo.c – histograms in the terminal for static or streaming data | Hacker News Reader

Histo.c – histograms in the terminal for static or streaming data

github.com

57 pointstoni23 comments

Gnuplot [http://www.gnuplot.info/] can plot histograms and supports terminal output. In fact here is an example of it being used to show live memory useage on a console [http://filipivianna.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/plotting-memory-u...].

I've somehow gone through life[1] without knowing about:

  set terminal dumb

Thanks!

[1] http://akkartik.name/bash.html#plot

1) In main.c the vals array is statically sized at 256 entries, but entries are put into it mod terminal width, with no guarantee that the terminal is <= 256 characters wide. That will lead to a buffer overflow. 2) INT_MIN cannot be negated -- you should check for that and just use INT_MAX instead.

Sadly doesn't work on linux, uses some weird escape sequences that I've never seen before (\e[1;2;f instead of \e[1;2H).

Having issues on OS X also. And the shell files in examples/ won't run because they're missing a #! line. Now I'm curious what system this was tested on.

On OSX it works for me using the default terminal. But in iTerm it didn't display properly :(

Sorry if I am just being slow this morning, but how can a histogram have a negative value?

At the point where you're allowing negative values, 'histogram' is probably a misnomer. Allowing for negative values lets you track things like delta, jerk, and so on, which can in turn reveal interesting data which isn't immediately obvious otherwise.

It looks like this tool doesn't actually calculate a histogram of the data, but simply plots a bar plot of integral data.

So, a negative value means whatever it means in your data.

I wrote a simple histogram tool for the command line that can be visualized by piping its output to gnuplot.

https://github.com/SamChill/hist

There was a tool that prints out one line graphs using utf8 characters. I can't remember what it's called off the top of my head unfortunately.

https://github.com/holman/spark

thank you very much! I even had it starred. hah.

Neat! I made an uglier and simpler version of this a while back (also in C) https://github.com/jzellner/tfig -- I should get off my butt and make it prettier.

I've been itching to display data from Cube [1] in the Terminal. This might be a way in.

[1] https://github.com/square/cube

Now that's impressive. Piped some stats to it, and it looks amazing.

My favorite part is how it will scale to the terminal size. First responsive design for terminal?

Is this functional on windows?

Nope. It's hardcoded to work only on terminal emulators. It should be possible to provide a Windows implementation of the few commands used, though. They map fairly trivially onto the Windows console functions.

That being said, I'm now thinking about creating a PowerShell implementation of this.

For what it's worth, it won't work on my Linux Debian box either...

I think you could use something like https://github.com/adoxa/ansicon to get it up and running pretty easily.

This is pretty nifty; I'll be tinkering with this a bit for sure! Nice work.

hmm, the interesting thing for me is there is apparently a c package manager. Though if this won't run on linux, I'd be worried about cpm.

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