Spark: Sparklines in your shell

48 pointsposted 8 hours ago
by hskimse

12 Comments

throw-the-towel

7 hours ago

russfink

4 hours ago

The web archive link, made available since the featured page has been hugged to death, has been hugged to death.

hskimse

6 hours ago

It is available but sometimes got rate limit due to AI crisis

priteau

6 hours ago

I am not sure why this repository last updated in November 2011 is suddenly on the front page?

Anyway, a better known implementation (in Bash) is probably https://github.com/holman/spark, which was developed by Zach Holman, one of the first GitHub hires.

rbanffy

5 hours ago

I was going to suggest using the new 2x4 unicode or Teletext glyphs, but they didn't exist in 2011. Is anything like this included in Linux distros? I couldn't find it in Fedora's or Ubuntu's repos. I guess I'll try my hand at making a new one. Might as well use it as an excuse to learn Rust.

mechanicum

3 hours ago

Braille characters would double the horizontal resolution but halve the already limited vertical resolution, which isn’t great for something that’s intended to be displayed inline with text.

I think Teletext might be even worse. IIRC, it only has three heights for its triangles.

If you’re interested in multiline plotting with braille characters, Ian Henry’s bytemap for Janet (https://github.com/ianthehenry/bytemap) is worth a look (or my Clojure port: https://github.com/waddie/bytemap.clj).

hskimse

5 hours ago

Similar first commit dates in the two repositories, it looks like there must have been some kind of trend around that time ;)

Anyway, this field has more famous people than anyone can keep track of; I hadn't heard of Zach Holman until just now either. For what it's worth, zx2c4 is also fairly well known for WireGuard.

luciandan

5 hours ago

That is so cool, that now I'm brainstorming CLI things to build that need a sparkline. Wonder if Claude Code can learn to use this.