bitjet 1.0.0

Binary data visualization as a Jupyter anywidget

bitjet

Binary data visualization as a Jupyter anywidget. Drop bytes in, see structure come out.

from bitjet import BitView, ByteView

BitView(data=open("/bin/ls", "rb").read(), datawidth=64)

What it does

Every bit (or byte) in your payload becomes a fixed-size block on a canvas. The datawidth slider changes how many units are drawn per row — not how big the canvas gets — so periodic structures in the data (byte boundaries in ASCII text, alignment padding, null runs in executables, LZ-compressed block headers) line up into columns and patterns pop out as you drag.

Install

pip install bitjet

That's it. anywidget handles the JS — no lab extension, no server extension, no rebuild step.

Use

from bitjet import BitView, ByteView

# Bit mode: each bit is a white (1) or black (0) block. Good for ASCII text,
# checksums, bitfields, anywhere the individual bits matter.
BitView(data=b"The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. " * 128, datawidth=64)

# Byte mode: each byte is a grayscale block (0=black, 255=white). Good for
# pixel data, pickled objects, compressed blobs, anything where byte-level
# entropy matters.
ByteView(data=bytes(range(256)) * 16, datawidth=32, block_size=6)

Assign to data to live-update:

import os

view = BitView(data=b"")
view  # renders

# In a later cell
view.data = os.urandom(8192)

Traitlets

trait	type	default	meaning
data	bytes	b""	The binary payload. Accepts bytes, bytearray, memoryview, or anything with .tobytes() (e.g. numpy.ndarray).
datawidth	int	64	Units per row. Bits if mode == "bit", bytes if mode == "byte".
block_size	int	4	Pixel side length of each unit. Fixed across widths so patterns scale.
mode	"bit" or "byte"	"bit"	Rendering mode.

All sync bidirectionally. Drag the slider and the Python side sees the update; assign view.datawidth = 128 and the canvas redraws.

Compatible with

• JupyterLab 3+
• Jupyter Notebook 7+
• VS Code notebooks
• nteract desktop (tested during development)
• Anything else that runs anywidget

History

Replaces the original 2014-era bitjet that depended on ipywidgets 1.x-style nbextensions. Same idea, modern plumbing — anywidget loads the ESM directly instead of requiring a notebook extension install.

License

BSD-3-Clause. See LICENSE.