mlterm VS feedgnuplot

In XTerm, this (rightly) makes no difference. In Foot and Contour however, you still end up a line resp. a screen below where you started, if now with the correct horizontal position.

So it seems to me like what you want should work by default, except it doesn’t.

It should be possible to instead just treat the whole thing as a graphical overlay (by computing or directly asking for the character cell size, as Kirill Panov rightly admonishes me is possible with XTWINOPS) without touching the cursor; that’s what the “sixel scrolling” setting (DECSDM) is supposed to do. Then you can just manually move the cursor forward however many positions after you’re done drawing.

Except apparently the DEC manual (the VT330/340 one above) and DEC hardware contradict each other as to which setting of DECSDM (set or reset) corresponds to which scrolling state (enabled or disabled), and XTerm has implemented it according to the manual not the VT3xx[1,2,3]—then most other emulators followed suit[4]—then XTerm switched to following the hardware[5,6] (unless you and that’s what I’m seeing on my machine right now. So now you need to check if you’re on XTerm ≥ 369 or not[7]. If I’m reading the Notcurses code right, other terminals have followed suit[8].

Again, ouch.

P.S. It seems DEC had an internal doc for how their terminals should operate (DEC STD 070) [9]. It does not document DECSDM at all.

[1] https://github.com/wez/wezterm/issues/217#issuecomment-86449...

[2] https://github.com/hackerb9/lsix/issues/41

[3] https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses/issues/1782

[4] https://github.com/arakiken/mlterm/pull/23

[5] https://invisible-island.net/xterm/xterm.log.html#xterm_369

[6] https://invisible-island.net/xterm/ctlseqs/ctlseqs.html#h3-T...

[7] https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses/commit/0918fa251e2... (the correct version cutoff is 369 not 359, the patch contains a now-fixed bug)

[8] https://github.com/dankamongmen/notcurses/blob/master/src/li... (look for mentions of invertsixel)

[9] http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/standards/EL-SM070-00_DEC_S...

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).