feedgnuplot VS libsixel

Thanks for the post. The obvious comparison is feedgnuplot: https://github.com/dkogan/feedgnuplot/

That works similarly in that it plots standard input. The backend is gnuplot, which is a double-edged sword: it's far more full-featured than brplot, but almost certainly is much slower also. I'll try out brplot to see if it would be a good replacement for cases where speed is important. Thanks!

Oh hey Dima.

Feedgnuplot is really slick.

https://github.com/dkogan/feedgnuplot

It's in the debian repos too.

Is there a declarative language or framework to create ad-hoc GUIs that consume structured data from stdin stream and spit-out a GUI?

Like feedgnuplot [1] but not only restricted to graphs.

[1] https://github.com/dkogan/feedgnuplot

I found using shell as an interactive environment to be pretty productive using https://github.com/dkogan/feedgnuplot and https://github.com/dkogan/vnlog. The filesystem becomes your state (instead of in memory state of your Python interpreter) which forces you to write Unix-style tools. Plotting with feedgnuplot spins up an interactive Qt plotter which I often used to explore 3D plots. It's not "inline" and fancy and does take a bit of grokking but I eventually found it more productive than Jupyter, especially as my development moved away from Python.

One of the tools I absolutely love is feedgnuplot which presents a stdin CLI interface to gnuplot.

Also, if one doesn't want to learn Gnuplot's DSL try using feedgnuplot which presents a stdin interface for whitespace delimited tabular data.

Write space delimited tabular data (ideally in vnlog format) and plot it using feedgnuplot. Also helps decouple concerns (data generating application focuses on generating data).

Library you can use to generate these images:

https://github.com/saitoha/libsixel

Plenty of links to other projects.

Sixels are pixels and enjoy a wide support due to how old it is.

Kitty protocol is PNG or primitives - which BTW would make it great for a GUI library.

Different tools for different needs, but if you are going for a wide support you want something simple that doesn't have 5 different types you have to separately implement and test:

> d: Direct (the data is transmitted within the escape code itself)

> f: A simple file (regular files only, not named pipes or similar)

> t: A temporary file, the terminal emulator will delete the file after reading the pixel data. For security reasons the terminal emulator should only delete the file if it is in a known temporary directory, such as /tmp, /dev/shm, TMPDIR env var if present and any platform specific temporary directories and the file has the string tty-graphics-protocol in its full file path.

> s: A shared memory object, which on POSIX systems is a POSIX shared memory object and on Windows is a Named shared memory object. The terminal emulator must read the data from the memory object and then unlink and close it on POSIX and just close it on Windows.

> What nonsense, it takes literally 15 lines of code without using anything beyond the standard library to write a client

Conveniently taking a preencoded PNG and assuming away the necessary queries of supported protocol:

> Since a client has no a-priori knowledge of whether it shares a filesystem/shared memory with the terminal emulator, it can send an id with the control data, using the i key (which can be an arbitrary positive integer up to 4294967295, it must not be zero).

> for the kitty graphics protocol. I challenge you to match that for sixel

https://github.com/saitoha/libsixel/tree/master/perl

    use Image::LibSIXEL;

Also:

https://github.com/saitoha/libsixel

contains img2sixel, which lets you dump images to the terminal. It can also do animated GIFs.

Video:

https://github.com/saitoha/FFmpeg-SIXEL

GUI apps:

https://github.com/saitoha/SDL1.2-SIXEL

and more, linked from the libsixel repository.

Not sure of Terminal emulator capabilities on Apple devices, but thanks to https://github.com/saitoha/libsixel , several applications, including emacs very much support image output in terminals.

You don't have multi-colored terminal output? Even legacy systems have long had Sixel support.

> SIXEL is one of image formats for printer and terminal imaging introduced by Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC). Its data scheme is represented as a terminal-friendly escape sequence. So if you want to view a SIXEL image file, all you have to do is "cat" it to your terminal

https://github.com/saitoha/libsixel