This repo provides a chart command-line utility. chart is aimed to generate
basic 2D charts from command line easily.
The chart utility is not aimed to give full control over generated charts, or
to generate all possible types of charts - you may anytime do that by use of
gnuplot or Chart package. This utility, instead, gives you a very
quick way of generating some most useful types of charts.
Usage example:
$ cat > input.txt
X Y1 Y2
1 1 3
2 4 6
3 7 4
4 5 8
6 3 2
^D
$ chart --header -o lines.png input.txt
Result:
Supported chart types for now are:
- Line charts (the default one)
- Bar charts (clustered and stacked)
- Area charts
- Point charts
Other chart types may be added later.
Supported output formats are:
- PNG (the default one)
- SVG
- PS (PostScript)
Output file format is automatically detected by specified output file name. If
output file name is not specified explicitly, chart.png will be used.
Plotting the file bigfile.txt (2.8Mb, 230 000 + lines) with
chart -o bigfile.png --line-ending=unix -d' ' -i --width=1920 --height=1200 points bigfile.txt
takes about 45 seconds on my machine (i5 2.8 GHz).
Input data are expected to be provided as a series of lines; each line may represent either one point to plot, or several points at the same X coordinate.
The first line may optionally represent names of the columns.
Other lines should consist of several numbers. Numbers are separated with a
delimiter. Default delimiter is TAB characater; you may specify another with
-d command line option.
If only one number per line is provided, then these numbers will be used as Y values; for X values, line numbers (starting with 1) will be used.
If more than one number per line is provided, then for most chart types (except for bar charts) the first column will be used as X values, and other will be used as Y values.
In the first column, date/time values may be provided instead of numbers (to be used as values along X axis). Supported date/time formats are:
- DD.MM.YYYY
- YYYY/MM/DD
- `12 September 2012'
- today, tomorrow, yesterday
- `in 2 days', '3 weeks ago'
- `last monday', 'next friday'
last month' (1th of this month),next year' (1th of January of next year)
(thanks to dates package).
I'll put it here for quick reference; more actual information is always
accessible with chart --help:
Usage: chart [-o|--output OUTPUT.png] [COMMAND] [-1|--header]
[--line-ending UNIX|DOS|MACOS] [-d|--delimiter CHAR] [-i|--index]
[-t|--title TITLE] [-w|--width WIDTH] [-h|--height HEIGHT]
[-b|--background COLOR] [-f|--foreground COLOR]
[-L|--legend ON|OFF] [INPUT.txt]
Make a chart
Available options:
-o,--output OUTPUT.png write output to OUTPUT.png. Default is chart.png.
-1,--header first line contains column headers
--line-ending UNIX|DOS|MACOS
specify line endings variant to be used (default: LF)
-d,--delimiter CHAR specify fields delimiter ('\t' by default)
-i,--index if enabled, treat input data as if there was an
additional first column, containing line numbers,
starting from 1
-t,--title TITLE set chart title to TITLE
-w,--width WIDTH specify chart width, in pixels (default: 800)
-h,--height HEIGHT specify chart height, in pixels (default: 600)
-b,--background COLOR specify background color name (see SVG 1.1 spec)
-f,--foreground COLOR specify foreround color name (see SVG 1.1 spec)
-L,--legend ON|OFF enable or disable the legend (default: True)
INPUT.txt Input data file. If not provided, standard input will
be used.
-h,--help Show this help text
Available commands:
line Make a line chart
area Make an area chart
points Make a points chart
bar Make a bar chart
Prerequisites for Debian / Ubuntu Linux:
$ sudo apt install libgmp-dev libgtk-3-dev libgirepository-1.0-1 libgirepository1.0-dev gobject-introspection
Prerequisites for Mac OS X:
$ brew install gobject-introspection gtk+ gtk+3
Install it by stack:
$ sudo apt-get install stack
$ git clone https://github.com/portnov/chart-cli.git
$ cd chart-cli/
$ stack install