Interactive Terminal Utilities
Project description
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.
44% ======================----------------------------- -00:00:02.1
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