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holman
spark
Shell2011–2026
holman / spark

spark

▁▂▃▅▂▇ in your shell.

Command Line
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
25Distinct people
31Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
6.1KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

▁▂▃▅▂▇ in your shell.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year31 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2011-11-15 08:04:44 UTC to 2026-08-30 11:17:36 UTC.

02468102011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 9 mentions; 1 submissions, 8 comments20112012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 1 submissions, 3 comments2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 9 mentions; 2 submissions, 7 comments2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 1 submissions, 2 comments2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments20182019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20112011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC918
20122012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC413
20132013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC927
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC312
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

From the project README

An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.

Read the project’s introduction
spark sparklines for your shell See? Here's a graph of your productivity gains after using spark: ▁▂▃▅▇ install spark is a shell script, so drop it somewhere and make sure it's added to your $PATH. It's helpful if you have a super-neat collection of dotfiles, like mine. Or you can use the following one-liner: sudo sh -c "curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/holman/spark/master/spark -o /usr/local/bin/spark && chmod +x /usr/local/bin/spark" If you're on OS X, spark is also on Homebrew: brew install spark Depending on the fonts you have in your system and you use in the terminal, you might end up with irregular blocks. This is due to some fonts providing only part of the blocks, while the others are taken from a different, fallback font. usage Just run spark and pass it a list of numbers (comma-delimited, spaces, whatever you'd like). It's designed to be used in conjunction with other scripts that can output in that format. spark 0 30 55 80 33 150 ▁▂▃▅▂▇ Invoke help with spark -h. cooler usage There's a lot of stuff you can do. Number of commits to the github/github Git repository, by author: › git shortlog -s | cut -f1 | spark ▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▃▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▂▁▁▅▁▂▁▁▁▂▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▂▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁ Magnitude of earthquakes worldwide 2.5 and above in the last 24 hours: › curl -s https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/feed/v1.0/summary/2.5_day.csv | sed '1d' | cut -d, -f5 | spark ▃█▅▅█▅▃▃▅█▃▃▁▅▅▃▃▅▁▁▃▃▃▃▃▅▃█▅▁▃▅▃█▃▁ Code visualization. The number of characters of spark itself, by line, ignoring empty lines: › awk '{ print length($0) }' spark | grep -Ev 0 | spark ▁▁▁▁▅▁▇▁▁▅▁▁▁▁▁▂▂▁▃▃▁▁▃▁▃▁▂▁▁▂▂▅▂▃▂▃▃▁▆▃▃▃▁▇▁▁▂▂▂▇▅▁▂▂▁▇▁▃▁▇▁▂▁▇▁▁▆▂▁▇▁▂▁▁▂▅▁▂▁▆▇▇▂▁▂▁▁▁▂▂▁▅▁▂▁▁▃▁▃▁▁▁▃▂▂▂▁▁▅▂▁▁▁▁▂▂▁▁▁▂▂ Since it's just a shell script, you could pop it in your prompt, too: ruby-1.8.7-p334 in spark/ on master with history: ▂▅▇▂ › wicked cool usage Sounds like a wiki is a great place to collect all of your wicked cool usage for spark. contributing Contributions welcome! Like seriously, I think contributions are real nifty. Make your changes and be sure the tests all pass: ./test That also means you should probably be adding your own tests as well as changing the code. Wouldn't want to lose all your good work down the line, after all! Once everything looks good, open a pull request. ▇▁ ⟦⟧ ▇▁ This is a @holman joint.
Read the full README on GitHub

What Hacker News says

31 sources
hombre_fatal·Feb 3, 2021
Edit: Oops, thought this was a Show HN. Looks pretty clean. If you want a fun feature to build, add tiny sparkline graphs. Maybe pressing z/x/c/v can switch between last hour/day/month/year charts on each stock item. Check out https://github.com/holman/spark for how to make graphs with simple character glyphs. I realize my problem with terminal programs like this is that I forget to ever use them. That's why I prefer something like a macOS menubar app that I can toggle to run at startup.
In A terminal stock watcher and stock position tracker
dividedbyzero·Jul 10, 2020
npx seems to be resolving dependencies for 10 seconds at every single launch; that's pretty annoying. Is there a way to turn that off? Apart from that, I like the idea! I'd say this has a lot of promise, and as a frequent user of wttr.in, I could see myself use something like that. Are the total cases, deaths, recoveries something people actively look at, though? I find it really hard to derive insight from them, it feels like there is a lot more value in measures of change of those numbers over time, as with Covid19, the really big danger lies in spread getting out of control. Maybe there could be some sparklines, using something like this [0] maybe? Also, I'd really like to see an easy way to filter the list of countries (I could grep, but that would wreck the presentation I guess) – actually, being able to get raw values for, say, tota
Read the rest
l cases in Germany, like via command line arguments, that might be handy for use in scripts. [0] https://github.com/holman/spark
In Show HN: COVIDnow – monitor COVID19 numbers via CLI
holman·Sep 12, 2017
Ha, I dig the name `spark`. I did a tangentially related project years ago — also called spark — that did simple sparklines in shell: https://github.com/holman/spark Just as a warning, though; over the years I’ve gotten 3-4 requests by media companies to write a book on Apache Spark, so, um, watch out for that one. (Regardless of whether you know Apache Spark or not, you should go for it. I believe in you.)
In A font to make sparklines in seconds
WestCoastJustin·Aug 14, 2013
Age and skills seem to be a factor. The people in the video are 40+, with many doing marketing/sales. The HN community, based off the what is your age? poll [1], suggests the majority here are between 21-35, so we probably are not experiencing their problem. Second, networking is a major factor, if the software keyword system is really the issue, you need to find ways around the system, email your old co-workers, etc. This is why it is important to keep learning, as tech evolves, and to put your self out there, through quality work. One thing did bother me a little, is pride a factor here? There were lower level job, but many did not want to take them, because they felt it was below them, or they were over qualified. If you are in the red, with zero money coming in, isn't anything better than nothing, at least as a gap till you find somet
Read the rest
hing better? ▁▁▂▇█▅▂▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁ | | 21 35 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5536734 ps. I created the bar graph via https://github.com/holman/spark
In Is LinkedIn Cheating Employers and Job Seekers Alike?

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