INInCom-0·Aug 31, 2025Submission
Show HN: Incplot – CLI tool for drawing plots in the terminal using Unicode
Hello HN,
I have been building incplot, a CLI tool for drawing plots in the terminal using unicode characters.
It is intended to be the most convenient way to quickly visualize small to moderately sized data right inside the terminal.
It is aiming to be useful especially within more or less general terminal workflow for visualizing output of other CLI tools or shell commands
What it does:
- Draws great looking plots 'out of the box'
- Automatically infers what should be drawn and how from the data passed into it (optional override with command line arguments)
- Accepts piped in data in JSON, JSON Lines, NDJSON, CSV, TSV
- Reasonable and actually useful error messages
- Is cross-platform on mainstream systems (Windows, Linux, MacOS)
The tool was inspired by other solutions, notably (and transitively many others that came before):
https://g
Read the rest
ithub.com/red-data-tools/YouPlot
https://github.com/JuliaPlots/UnicodePlots.jl
What it does differently than existing solutions:
- Requires less input from the user (due to automatic inference and sensible defaults)
- It doesn't let the user customize the look of the plots drawn
- It is fast (notably because it is all C++ native code)
- Lots of small QOL features baked in that (in the author's opinion) make the result look better by default
On a personal note, I created this tool to learn modern day C++ (notably C++20 and C++23), its tooling and its whole ecosystem.
There may be rough edges here and there (in fact there almost certainly are). However, the tool is not super early stage and it has been tested moderately.
I'd love some feedback.