jp - simple terminal plots from JSON data

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jp - simple terminal plots from JSON data ☶ show go visualization github.com
authored by sgreben 5 years ago | archive
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| 6 comments

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Another little JSON-consuming CLI tool. I wanted an easy way to draw basic plots (line & bar charts) of JSON data in the terminal, and found the following tools:

gnuplot (too complex for my usecase, no JSON) / the eplot wrapper (ruby dependency, still no JSON)
https://github.com/Tabcorp/cli-plot (node dependency, y-value bar charts only)
https://github.com/glamp/bashplotlib (python dependency, CSV only)

I wasn’t 100% happy with any of those. You can generate CSV with jq (jq '"\(.x),\(.y)"'), but this is tedious to type. So, I wrote jp. Primarily because it would be fun to write it (but also because it seems useful). It has the features and “ui” I wanted:

single binary, no dependencies
stupidly simple
reads JSON, uses JSONPath expressions to select the data to plot

For example, if I want to plot all Foo keys against all Bar keys, I can write jp -x ..Foo -y ..Bar. Any other pre-processing is delegated to jq.

On a personal note, I am growing rather fond of JSON-in-the-shell. It’s a bit like PowerShell but less demanding.

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sgreben 5 years ago | link

I have been informed that “actually decent” plots are provided by a Julia package UnicodePlots. They do indeed look rather neat, so until jp gets there, UnicodePlots does make better plots :)
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  ac 5 years ago | link
  
  That was a rude comment, don’t take it personally, it looks great.
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dallas 5 years ago | link

this is awesome!
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  sgreben 5 years ago | link
  
  Thanks for the kind words, glad you like it!
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aerique 5 years ago | link

Ha, nice! I was recently looking for a tool that could plot on the CLI as well. I came across bashplotlib but failed at Googling and didn’t find the others mentioned on this page and I fell back to gnuplot’s term mode.

I’ve always liked CLI tools although I use GUIs as well, but I’ve come to realize that the CLI is not something to be superseded by GUIs. They are different ways of interfacing with a computer and can exists side-by-side and so I’m happy to see new tools being created for it.
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zeebo 5 years ago | link

I recently found https://github.com/rs/jplot which isn’t limited to using characters, but is limited to iTerm2. You also might want to check out the https://github.com/gizak/termui library for inspiration on how to do higher resolution plots.