plotui

Interactive 2D/3D plots in the terminal — Plotly-style — for Textual, Ratatui, and Bubble Tea, powered by a Rust core and the Kitty graphics protocol.

plotui renders scatter plots (and, soon, lines / surfaces / bars) as real pixel graphics inside a terminal, and lets you rotate, pan, and zoom them. It drops into a Textual, Ratatui, or Bubble Tea app as a first-class widget, with the rendering engine written in Rust so it stays fast in 2D and 3D.

Status: early scaffold. Working today: 2D scatter/line/bar charts with axes, ticks, and a legend; a 3D scatter/graph engine; a Kitty-image raw demo; and a Textual widget. See the roadmap below.

Architecture

The one rule that shapes everything: the Rust core owns pixels, not the terminal. It has no event loop and no input handling — the TUI framework (Textual, Ratatui, or Bubble Tea) owns the loop, forwards input to the camera, and asks for a frame.

crates/
  plotui-core/      pure engine: data model, 3D camera, rasterizer → RGBA
  plotui-protocol/  RGBA → terminal bytes (Kitty graphics protocol)
  plotui-term/      shared frontend glue: render-path detection, cell-pixel
                    probing, tmux passthrough, the per-frame render policy
  plotui-bind/      shared binding semantics: parsing, validation, defaults,
                    and their exact error messages (Python and Go agree)
  plotui-py/        PyO3 bindings → the `plotui._plotui` native module
  plotui-ratatui/   Ratatui widget (native Rust frontend)
  plotui-ffi/       C ABI (cdylib + staticlib) behind the Go bindings
python/plotui/      the Python package + Textual `PlotWidget`
go/                 Go bindings + `teaplot`, the Bubble Tea v2 component
examples/           raw_demo.py (Kitty images), textual_demo.py

core and protocol are pure and I/O-free, so the same engine can back every frontend and be unit-tested by hashing pixel buffers.

Integrations

Each TUI framework gets a first-class widget, not a port. All frontends sit on the same policy crates (plotui-term for detection/tmux/render policy, plotui-bind for argument validation and its exact error strings), so a plot looks and behaves identically whichever framework hosts it — down to the error messages.

The three TUI widgets have feature parity: render-path detection, tmux passthrough, drag/zoom/pan/keys, picking + hover, the 2D crosshair, text overlays, half-resolution interaction frames, and streaming extend.

Install the CLI

plotui is also a command-line tool: pipe columns of numbers in, get a real-pixel chart out — interactive on a TTY (pan, zoom, crosshair), a single printed frame when piped or with --static.

curl -fsSL https://plotui.xyz/install.sh | sh   # prebuilt binary
brew install sebaheg/tap/plotui                 # Homebrew (macOS / Linux)
cargo install plotui                            # build from source
cargo binstall plotui                           # prebuilt, via cargo-binstall

seq 1 100 | awk '{print $1, sin($1/10)}' | plotui line
plotui scatter -H -d, data.csv                  # header row + comma-delimited
plotui bar counts.tsv

Like every plotui frontend, the CLI needs a terminal with Kitty graphics (supported terminals below); elsewhere it prints a notice and exits.

Develop

Requires Rust and Python 3.9+. Build the native module into a virtualenv with maturin:

python -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
pip install maturin textual
maturin develop --release

Then, in a terminal with Kitty graphics support — Kitty, Ghostty, iTerm2 ≥ 3.5, WezTerm, or Konsole — for the full-resolution pixel demos:

python examples/raw_demo.py        # 3D scatter via Kitty images
python examples/textual_demo.py    # embedded in Textual
python examples/textual_graph.py   # interactive graph: hover + click-to-inspect

The Textual widget picks its render path per terminal: Unicode-placeholder Kitty graphics in Kitty/Ghostty, direct Kitty placement in iTerm2/WezTerm/ Konsole — plus Warp, Rio, and VS Code, whose younger Kitty decoders are supported but still maturing (VS Code needs its terminal.integrated.enableImages setting). plotui only draws real pixels — terminals without Kitty graphics get a notice naming supported terminals, never a degraded plot. Override with PLOTUI_RENDER=placeholder|direct or PlotWidget(..., render_mode=...).

Python API

from plotui import Plot

# 2D: axes, ticks, and a legend appear automatically. Traces added without a
# color take palette slots in fixed order; `name=` puts a series in the legend.
plot = Plot()
plot.add_line(xs, ys, name="forecast")
plot.add_scatter(xs2, ys2, name="observed")
plot.add_bar(xs3, heights)

# Secondary axes: axis="y2"/"y3" bind a series to an independent right-hand
# axis — its own autoscale and tick column, labels tinted to the series color
# (y2 innermost, y3 outermost). The grid stays with the left axis.
plot.add_line(xs, tokens, name="tokens", axis="y2")
plot.add_line(xs, cpu_minutes, name="cpu min", axis="y3")

# 3D: any 3D trace switches the plot to the orbit camera.
plot = Plot()
plot.add_scatter3d(xs, ys, zs, color=(230, 60, 120), size=2.0)

# Streaming: every add_* returns a trace handle. Append through it instead
# of rebuilding — O(new points), autoscale follows; numpy arrays are read
# in one bulk copy. set_visible toggles a series without losing its handle,
# palette slot, or node indices.
h = plot.add_line([], [], name="loss")
plot.extend(h, xs, ys)                # 3D scatter/line: extend(h, xs, ys, zs)
plot.set_visible(h, False)

# Interaction (forward your framework's events to these):
plot.rotate(d_yaw, d_pitch)
plot.zoom_by(factor)
plot.pan(dx, dy)
plot.reset()

# Render (the frontend places the bytes):
escape = plot.render_kitty(cols, rows, cell_w, cell_h)   # Kitty pixel image
pixels = plot.render_rgba(px_w, px_h)                    # raw RGBA8 bytes

Graphs take per-element styling, and the camera/projection state is fully scriptable — the hooks a host needs for label overlays, camera targeting, and rebuilding a plot without losing the view:

plot.add_graph3d(xs, ys, zs, edges=[(0, 1), (1, 2)],
                 node_colors=[...],          # one (r, g, b) per node
                 node_sizes=[...],           # per-node radius (else `size`)
                 edge_colors=[...],          # per-edge (r, g, b) (else derived)
                 node_shapes=[...])          # per-node "disc" | "ring" | "square" |
                                             #   "triangle" | "diamond" | "diamond-open" | "dot"
plot.set_show_box(False)                     # hide the 3D orientation cube
plot.set_bounds((x0, y0, z0), (x1, y1, z1))  # pin the data frame (else the nodes'
                                             #   bounding box); None, None restores
plot.set_chrome(grid=(26, 32, 36),           # recolour the non-data chrome to sit on
                frame=(43, 50, 55),          #   your own background: bg (legend box),
                ink=(103, 111, 118))         #   frame, grid, ink, ink_bright

state = plot.camera_state()                  # (yaw, pitch, zoom, pan_x, pan_y)
plot.set_camera_state(*state)                # restore (e.g. onto a new Plot)
plot.project_nodes(px_w, px_h)               # [(x_px, y_px, depth)] per node —
                                             # exact render/pick geometry

In Textual, use plotui.textual.PlotWidget(plot) and it handles the event plumbing for you. Pass pickable=True to make 3D graph nodes and edges interactive: hovering lights the element under the cursor up white, and clicking posts an ElementPicked message with ("node", i) or ("edge", i) (see examples/textual_graph.py, which opens a slide-in inspector from it).

The widget also supports text overlays — widget.set_overlay([(row, col, text, style), ...]) splices terminal-crisp text (labels, badges) over the image in every render mode without re-rasterizing — and exposes a widget.dragging property for hosts that defer work mid-gesture. To customize interaction in a subclass, override the apply_rotate / apply_pan / apply_zoom / apply_reset / on_click_at primitives that every input path routes through — do not override the Textual on_* handlers (Textual dispatches those to every class in the MRO, so both would run).

Roadmap

• Flicker-free Kitty placement via Unicode-placeholder virtual placement (fixed image id, atomic replace) — wire the pixel path into the Textual widget
• 2D traces: scatter, line, bar; axes, ticks, tick labels, legend
• Independent right-hand y-axes (axis="y2"/"y3") with tinted tick labels
• 2D step trace; axis titles; time-formatted x ticks
• 3D surface / mesh; axis cube with labels
• Interactive hover / pick for 3D graph nodes and edges (opt-in via PlotWidget(..., pickable=True): hover lights the element up white, click posts ElementPicked)
• Hover / pick for 2D traces; spatial index for large graphs
• Streaming append: trace handles, extend, set_visible, incremental bounds
• numpy fast-path input (one bulk copy, no per-element conversion)
• Rolling window (max_points) for endless streams
• Graceful render-path auto-detection (placeholder / direct Kitty, with a supported-terminals notice elsewhere and a PLOTUI_RENDER override)
• Sixel + iTerm2 OSC 1337 encoders for terminals without Kitty graphics
• Prebuilt wheels (maturin + cibuildwheel)
• Ratatui frontend (native): plotui-ratatui — StatefulWidget + app-owned PlotState, full parity with the Textual widget (cargo run -p plotui-ratatui --example demo)
• Bubble Tea frontend (cgo): go/ bindings over the plotui-ffi C ABI + the teaplot component for Bubble Tea v2 (see go/README.md)
• Prebuilt static libs for the Go bindings (today: local source build)

License

MIT