bliplot

Stupidly simple terminal graphs. One function with zero config needed and sub-character resolution.

from bliplot import plot
print(plot([1, 4, 2, 8, 5, 7, 3, 9, 6]))

That's it. That's the whole API.

Why

Every terminal-plotting library makes you learn its DSL before you can see a single number. bliplot is one function that takes a list and gives you back a string. Print it, log it, pipe it, stream it... It doesn't care. It's yours !

Install

pip install bliplot

or, if you're using uv:

uv add bliplot

Usage

import math
from bliplot import plot


def generate_waveform(x: float) -> float:
    return math.sin(x / 10) * math.cos(x / 5) * 10


data_points = [generate_waveform(x) for x in range(100)]

graph = plot(data_points, width=70, height=15, color="CYAN")
print(graph)

Live / streaming graphs

Because plot() just returns a string, you can call it in a loop for a live-updating graph. No special "live mode" needed:

import math
import time
from bliplot import plot

CLEAR = "\033[H\033[J"
WIDTH = 80
HEIGHT = 15

# We run this for 200 frames of animation
for t in range(200):
    lst = []
    for x in range(WIDTH):
        # Moving the x offset by t * 0.2 causes the wave to travel left to right
        x_moving = x - (t * 0.2)

        # Base wave + high frequency noise
        wave = math.sin(x_moving * 0.2) * math.cos(x_moving * 0.05)
        noise = 0.2 * math.sin(x_moving * 1.5)

        # Center envelope to keep the edges clean
        envelope = math.exp(-((x - (WIDTH / 2)) / (WIDTH / 3)) ** 2)

        lst.append((wave + noise) * envelope)

    # Overwrite the screen
    print(
        CLEAR + plot(lst, width=WIDTH, height=HEIGHT, color="GREEN"), end="", flush=True
    )
    time.sleep(0.04)  # ~25 frames per second

The clear-screen escape redraws the graph in place instead of scrolling a new one down the terminal on every iteration.

Parameters

plot(lst: list, width: int = None, height: int = None, color: str = None) -> str

Returns a string, ready to print().

NaN, +Inf, and -Inf values in lst are treated as 0.

How it works

Terminal graphs are usually blocky because each character cell can only be "on" or "off" so you lose all the resolution between one row of blocks and the next. bliplot fixes this by spliting each value into an integer part and a fractional remainder. The integer part decides how many full blocks (█) to stack. The remainder picks which of the 8 partial block glyphs (▁▂▃▄▅▆▇█) caps the column, giving you roughly 8x the vertical resolution.

Negative values use the upper-eighth block set (▔🮂🮃▀🮄🮅🮆█) so bars growing downward from the midline look correct rather than upside-down.

License

MIT