itrm 0.2.2

Interactive Terminal Utilities

Interactive Terminal Utilities

import itrm

This library provides several functions for nicely printing data to the terminal. MatPlotLib is a very nice library, but it can be a bit tedious at times when all you want is something quick and dirty.

• Every separate plot needs to be introduced with a plt.figure() statement.
• Large sets of data can be slow to render.
• If you are working in full screen on the terminal, plots can pull you to another window which can be obnoxious.
• The entire python program and the terminal is locked up after any plt.show() command until you close all figure windows.
• Unless you save the figures to individual files, there is no buffer to show plots from past runs.
• Sometimes it it not available, such as when running code on a server through SSH.

These are all excuses to use this library. But, the biggest reason to use this library is that the terminal is cool, and the more you can do your work in the terminal the better!

As a warning, the terminal emulator built into Neovim does seem to struggle to correctly handle string buffering of Unicode characters. Consequently, with itrm.config.uni set to True (the default) the plots can have garbled characters and not display correctly. Setting the uni property to False will remove that problem. Other terminal emulators tested do not have this problem.

Defaults

While itrm does not use dotfiles, you can set some "defaults" with the config class. For example, by default Unicode characters are used throughout, but you can change this by setting itrm.config.uni to False before any other call to itrm. The following table lists the configuration options:

Setting	Default	Description
uni	True	flag to use Unicode characters
cols	60	default column width
rows	20	default row height
ar	0.48	aspect ratio of characters

There is also a method for changing the color map: itrm.config.cmap(). It takes a string: "colors", "viridis", "grays", "reds", "greens", or "blues".

Interactive Plots

itrm.iplot(x, y=None, label=None, rows=1, cols=1,
        lg=None, overlay=False):

The iplot function will render all the data points defined by x and y to the terminal. The inputs x and y can be vectors or matrices. If they are matrices, each row is treated as a separate curve. Note, this is different from MatPlotLib, in which each column is treated as a separate row. (This difference is intentional, as in the author's opinion varying time along columns means each column in a matrix can be treated as a vector. This arrangement works very well with in linear algebra, especially matrix multiplication with a "set" of vectors over time.)

The shapes of x and y do not have to be the same, but they must be compatible. So, x could be a vector and y could be a matrix as long as the length of x equals the number of columns of y.

If only x is given, it will be interpreted as the y values, and the x values will be the array of indices.

When the plot is printed, the graph is rendered within a box and the ranges of x and y are listed in the bottom left corner. So,

(0:99, -1.5:1.5)

means that x ranges from 0 to 99 and y ranges from -1.5 to 1.5.

If a label is given, this will be printed in the bottom right of the plot box.

The rows and cols parameters let you specify the number of terminal text rows and columns to use for the plot, respectively. For each of these, if the value is less than or equal to 1, it represents a portion of the available space to use. For example, if rows is 0.5, then half the number of rows of the current terminal window will be used for the plot. If the value is greater than 1, it represents the absolute number of rows or columns to use. Also, if the size of the current terminal cannot be obtained, the available space will default to 20 rows and 60 columns. These defaults can be redefined by changing itrm.config.rows and itrm.config.cols, respectively.

By default, this library will use Unicode symbols (specifically braille) for plotting. A recommended font is JuliaMono. However, if your font does not support the necessary Unicode symbols, you can tell the library to not use them by setting itrm.config.uni to False before calling the itrm.plot function. In that case, only ASCII characters will be used.

To distinguish multiple curves from each other, colors will be used. The color map is blue, green, yellow, orange, magenta, and purple. If you have more than 6 curves (This is just a terminal-based plot; why would you do that?), then the colors will recycle.

You can set the x or y axes to logarithmic scaling by setting the lg parameter to one of "x", "y", or "xy". Note that the values reported for the view and the cursor will also be logarithmic.

To prevent your terminal history from extending each time a new plot is rendered, you can print a new plot over a previous plot by setting the overlay parameter to True. This can be especially useful when there a multiple plots to render but you do not want your terminal history to fill up quickly.

The iplot function provides interactivity through a vertical cursor. You can move the cursor left and right, at normal speed or fast speed. You can zoom in and out. And, you can cycle through which rows of the x and y data to focus on. Note, iplot is designed for monotonically-increasing x values, and, consequently, does not support equal axis scaling.

The following table details the shortcut keys:

Keys	Function		Keys	Function
q, x, ⌫, ↵	exit interactive plot		j, s, ↓	zoom in
h, a, ←	move cursor left		k, w, ↑	zoom out
l, d, →	move cursor right		J, S, ⇧↓	zoom in fast
H, A, ⇧←	move cursor left fast		K, W, ⇧↑	zoom out fast
L, D, ⇧→	move cursor right fast		n	next data row
g	move cursor to start		p	previous data row
G	move cursor to end		i	toggle individual view
c, z	center view on cursor		r	redraw the whole plot

Plots

itrm.plot(x, y=None, label=None, rows=1, cols=1,
        equal_axes=0, lg=None, overlay=False):

The plot function is a non-interactive version of the iplot function.

The plot function will render all the data points defined by x and y to the terminal. The inputs x and y can be vectors or matrices. If they are matrices, each row is treated as a separate curve. Note, this is different from MatPlotLib, in which each column is treated as a separate row. (This difference is intentional, as in the author's opinion varying time along columns means each column in a matrix can be treated as a vector. This arrangement works very well with in linear algebra, especially matrix multiplication with a "set" of vectors over time.)

The shapes of x and y do not have to be the same, but they must be compatible. So, x could be a vector and y could be a matrix as long as the length of x equals the number of columns of y.

If only x is given, it will be interpreted as the y values, and the x values will be the array of indices.

When the plot is printed, the graph is rendered within a box and the ranges of x and y are listed in the bottom left corner. So,

(0:99, -1.5:1.5)

means that x ranges from 0 to 99 and y ranges from -1.5 to 1.5.

If a label is given, this will be printed in the bottom right of the plot box.

The rows and cols parameters let you specify the number of terminal text rows and columns to use for the plot, respectively. For each of these, if the value is less than or equal to 1, it represents a portion of the available space to use. For example, if rows is 0.5, then half the number of rows of the current terminal window will be used for the plot. If the value is greater than 1, it represents the absolute number of rows or columns to use. Also, if the size of the current terminal cannot be obtained, the available space will default to 20 rows and 60 columns. These defaults can be redefined by changing itrm.config.rows and itrm.config.cols, respectively.

By default, this library will use Unicode symbols (specifically braille) for plotting. A recommended font is JuliaMono. However, if your font does not support the necessary Unicode symbols, you can tell the library to not use them by setting itrm.config.uni to False before calling the itrm.plot function. In that case, only ASCII characters will be used.

To distinguish multiple curves from each other, colors will be used. The color map is blue, green, yellow, orange, magenta, and purple. If you have more than 6 curves (This is just a terminal-based plot; why would you do that?), then the colors will recycle.

If you want equal axis scaling, set equal_axes to True. However, since terminal fonts are not always the same aspect ratio and because the line spacing in your terminal might be adjustable, you can adjust the understood character aspect ratio with itrm.config.ar. The default value is 0.48. This means the width of a character is understood to be about 0.48 of the height of a character. Making this value larger means the characters are interpreted to be wider, making the plot narrower horizontally. This is a feature the iplot function does not share. Because the plot supports equal axis scaling, it does not require that the x axis data monotonically increase.

You can set the x or y axes to logarithmic scaling by setting the lg parameter to one of "x", "y", or "xy". Note that the values reported for the view will also be logarithmic.

To prevent your terminal history from extending each time a new plot is rendered, you can print a new plot over a previous plot by setting the overlay parameter to True. This can be especially useful when creating a live animation.

Single curve	Multiple curves

Bars

itrm.bars(x, labels=None, cols=1, fat=False)

It can be convenient to plot a simple bar graph. The x input is the vector of values. The labels input is a list of strings corresponding to the labels to print before the bar of each value in x. If the cols input is greater than 1, it is the total width of characters including the labels. If it is less than or equal to 1, it is the portion of the terminal window width which will be used for the graph. If the fat input is set to True, the bars will be thick.

 apples |=========                                         |
oranges |=========================================         |
bananas |==================================================|
  pears |====================                              |
 grapes |============================                      |

Heat maps

itrm.heat(matrix)

The heat function will generate a heat map of the matrix input using 24 shades of gray. Black is used for the lowest value and white for the highest value. If itrm.config.uni is True, half-block characters from the Unicode table will be used. If it is False, two spaces per element of the matrix will be used.

With Unicode	Without Unicode

Tables

itrm.table(matrix, head=None, left=None, width=10, sep='  ')

You can print a nicely spaced table of the matrix data. The head and left inputs are lists of header and left-most column labels, respectively, to print around the matrix.

           |      Set 1       Set 2       Set 3
---------- | ----------  ----------  ----------
    apples | 0.65802165  0.20015677  0.51074794
   bananas | 0.42184098  0.46774988  0.39589918
     pears | 0.79159879  0.89324181  0.57347394
   oranges | 0.25932644  0.29973433  0.90646047
    grapes |  0.2751687  0.40117769  0.58233234

Sparsity

itrm.sparsity(matrix, label='')

If all you want to see is the sparsity of a matrix, use this function. The label input will be placed in the bottom-right corner of the render.

With Unicode	Without Unicode

Progress bars

itrm.progress(k, K, t_init=None, cols=1, fat=False)

There are many progress bar libraries available for Python. But, many of them seem to be extremely over-complicated. TQDM, for example, includes over 20 source files. This library's implementation of a progress bar is a single, one-page function. The k input is the counter of whatever for loop the progress bar is reporting on. The K input is one greater than the largest possible value of k, as in for k in range(K):. If t_init is provided, the estimated time remaining to complete the process based on the initial time stored in t_init will be displayed. When the process is completed, the total elapsed time since t_init will be displayed. If cols is not provided, the full width of the current terminal window will be used. If the fat input is set to True, the bars will be thick.

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