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incplot

(★ 103)

CLI tool for drawing great looking plots in the terminal and in HTML focused on user ergonomics and simplicity

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README.md

# Installation Guide

1. Get the code

git clone https://github.com/InCom-0/incplot

Downloads the entire project code from GitHub to your computer.

cd incplot

Moves into the project folder you just downloaded.

2. Official Install Script

Easy Recommended

Prerequisites

Homebrew A package manager for macOS/Linux.
Scoop A package manager for Windows.

brew install InCom-0/incom/incplot

Installs the pre-built package via Homebrew — no source build required.

scoop install incoms/incplot

Installs directly via Scoop (Windows).

✅ After installing, open a new terminal and run the program's version command (e.g. --version) to confirm it worked.

Pulled directly from this repo's README.

3. CMake

Medium

Prerequisites

Git Needed to download the project code from GitHub.
CMake The tool used to generate build configuration.
C/C++ 컴파일러 Windows needs Visual Studio (Community edition, free), macOS needs Xcode Command Line Tools, Linux needs the gcc/g++ package.

<a href="https://cmake.org/"><img alt="CMake" src="https://img.shields.io/badge/CMake-%23003765?style=flat&logo=cmake&labelColor=%23003765"></a>

Type this command into your terminal and run it.

✅ Check that an executable was created inside the build folder, then run it directly (e.g. ./build/app_name).

Pulled directly from this repo's README.

// repository documentation

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<div align="center">
     <img width="500" alt="incplot_logo" src="https://media.githubusercontent.com/media/InCom-0/incplot/0925a45f1aaf126df925ab2ccb6986a916d6aea9/images/logo/incplot_logo_t.png" />
     <hr>
     <a href="https://github.com/InCom-0/incplot/releases/"><img alt="Version" src="https://img.shields.io/github/v/release/InCom-0/incplot"></a>
     <a href="https://github.com/InCom-0/incplot/releases/latest/download/incplot_windows_msvc_x86_64.zip"><img alt="Windows" src="https://custom-icon-badges.demolab.com/badge/Windows-0078D6?logo=windows11&logoColor=white"></a>
     <a href="https://github.com/InCom-0/incplot/releases/latest/download/incplot_linux_x86_64.tar.gz"><img alt="Linux" src="https://img.shields.io/badge/Linux-FCC624?logo=linux&logoColor=black"></a>
     <a href="https://github.com/InCom-0/incplot/releases/latest/download/incplot_macos_arm64.tar.gz"><img alt="Linux" src="https://img.shields.io/badge/macOS-000000?logo=apple&logoColor=F0F0F0"></a>
     <a href="https://github.com/InCom-0/incplot/blob/main/LICENSE.txt"><img alt="MIT License" src="https://img.shields.io/github/license/InCom-0/incplot"></a>
     <br>
     <a href="https://github.com/InCom-0/incplot/actions/workflows/build.yml"><img alt="Build Status" src="https://github.com/InCom-0/incplot/actions/workflows/build.yml/badge.svg?branch=main"></a>
     <a href="https://en.cppreference.com/index.html"><img alt="CPP" src="https://img.shields.io/badge/C++-%2300599C.svg?logo=c%2B%2B&logoColor=white"></a>
     <a href="https://cmake.org/"><img alt="CMake" src="https://img.shields.io/badge/CMake-%23003765?style=flat&logo=cmake&labelColor=%23003765"></a>
     <br><br>
</div>
<div align="center">
Incplot is a command like tool for drawing great looking plots in the terminal using unicode characters.<br>
Automatically infers what to display and how based on the data piped in.<br>
Can also generate <a href="https://incom-0.github.io/incplot/">identical looking plot in HTML</a> purely using text.<br><br>
'As quick and as easy as possible' visualization of small to moderate sized data and information.
</div>

<br><img width="400" alt="scatter" src="https://media.githubusercontent.com/media/InCom-0/incplot/8c2b75a665a7aebd9e08ce2aba09707fc99cc17b/images/readme/scatter.png" /><img width="400" alt="multiline" src="https://media.githubusercontent.com/media/InCom-0/incplot/8c2b75a665a7aebd9e08ce2aba09707fc99cc17b/images/readme/multiline.png" /><img width="400" alt="BarHS" src="https://media.githubusercontent.com/media/InCom-0/incplot/8c2b75a665a7aebd9e08ce2aba09707fc99cc17b/images/readme/BarHS.png" /><img width="400" alt="BarVM" src="https://media.githubusercontent.com/media/InCom-0/incplot/8c2b75a665a7aebd9e08ce2aba09707fc99cc17b/images/readme/BarVM.png" /><img width="400" alt="BarHM" src="https://media.githubusercontent.com/media/InCom-0/incplot/8c2b75a665a7aebd9e08ce2aba09707fc99cc17b/images/readme/BarHM.png" /><img width="400" alt="barV" src="https://media.githubusercontent.com/media/InCom-0/incplot/8c2b75a665a7aebd9e08ce2aba09707fc99cc17b/images/readme/barV.png" />

## Installation ##
### Linux ###
Package is currently available in: [Arch Linux (AUR)](https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/incplot)

```bash
# Linux (other distributions)
# Note that Homebrew will install its own versions of all dependencies (separate from system libs)
brew install InCom-0/incom/incplot
```

### MacOS ###
```bash
# MacOS
brew install InCom-0/incom/incplot
```

### Windows ###
```bash
# Windows (with Scoop)
scoop bucket add incoms https://github.com/InCom-0/ScoopBucket_InCom
scoop install incoms/incplot
```

Windows binaries are also provided in [releases](https://github.com/InCom-0/incplot/releases/) in the github [repository](https://github.com/InCom-0/incplot) itself.

## Features ##

* Great looking plots 'out of the box'
* Zero configuration required, super simple to use
* No command line arguments necessary most of the time due to automatic inferrence
* Mainstream platform support (Windows, Linux, MacOS)
* Accepts piped in data in [JSON](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON), [JSON Lines](https://jsonlines.org/), [NDJSON](https://github.com/ndjson), [CSV](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma-separated_values), [TSV](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab-separated_values)
* Users can optionally specify some or all arguments in any (sensible) combination
* Blazingly fast
* Coloring support through integrated color schemes
* Ability to 'grab' currently used colors/scheme from the user's terminal and use it (if supported by the terminal app) with sensible fallback
* HTML mode that outputs the plot as self-contained 'pure text' static HTML page visually identical to the terminal version
* HTML mode allows to specify (any) font to be used (so that the plot can be made 'visually compatible' with other content)
* HTML mode can be used to generate plot content to embed into other pages eg. using \<iframe> element 
* Automatic but configurable filtering of extreme values
* Automatic sizing
* Automatic value labels and scaling with [metric prefixes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_prefix)
* Automatic string label sizing (ie. shortening where necessary)
* Automatic tickmarks
* Automatic legend
* Reasonable error messages (especially when the user asks for something that is impossible/unsupported)

## Showcase examples ##
The examples shown can be run directly as they are.
<br>
The data is pulled from this repository only routed through a link shortening service.
<br><br>
Please note that incplot checks whether the terminal windows is large enough (mostly meaning wide enough) to display the plot requested. If the users terminal windows is not large enough incplot will output an error message saying so. If that happens, the user can either change the size of the terminal windows so it is sufficient or choose a different plot type that might fit.

### Same data shown in 5 ways ###
<details>
<summary>Multiline plot - gets inferred from this data if plot type isn't specified</summary>

```bash
curl -sL https://kurzlinks.de/german_economy | incplot
```
<img width="800" alt="multiline" src="https://media.githubusercontent.com/media/InCom-0/incplot/6572c23a11d32823161f957330ed5b9d1b390f92/images/readme/showcase/g_eco_default.png" />
</details>
<details>
<summary>Horizontal stacked bar plot</summary>

```bash
curl -sL https://kurzlinks.de/german_economy | incplot -T
```
<img width="800" alt="BarHS" src="https://media.githubusercontent.com/media/InCom-0/incplot/6572c23a11d32823161f957330ed5b9d1b390f92/images/readme/showcase/g_eco_BarHS.png" />
</details>
<details>
<summary>Vertical simple bar plot</summary>

```bash
curl -sL https://kurzlinks.de/german_economy | incplot -B
```
<img width="800" alt="BarV" src="https://media.githubusercontent.com/media/InCom-0/incplot/6572c23a11d32823161f957330ed5b9d1b390f92/images/readme/showcase/g_eco_BarV.png" />
</details>
<details>
<summary>Horizontal multi bar plot</summary>

```bash
# Note that the size (notably width) is substantially larger and we have to limit the columns shown (depends on the users terminal windows size)
curl -sL https://kurzlinks.de/german_economy | incplot -H -y 2 3 4 5
```
<img width="800" alt="BarV" src="https://media.githubusercontent.com/media/InCom-0/incplot/6572c23a11d32823161f957330ed5b9d1b390f92/images/readme/showcase/g_eco_BarHM.png" />
</details>
<details>
<summary>Scatter plot</summary>

```bash
# Note that some plot types might not be meaningful for every data set
curl -sL https://kurzlinks.de/german_economy | incplot -S
```
<img width="800" alt="BarV" src="https://media.githubusercontent.com/media/InCom-0/incplot/6572c23a11d32823161f957330ed5b9d1b390f92/images/readme/showcase/g_eco_Scatter.png" />
</details>

## Hints, tips and tricks ##
<details>
<summary>Hints, tips and tricks</summary>

### Autoguessing ###

Incplot tries to be smart and makes an educated heuristic guess as to what it is the user wants displayed. However, it may not always succeed in guessing or guessing right. For this reason it is usually best to pipe in only the data (ie. the data columns) that the user wants displayed. It is especially not advisable to pipe in entire 'databases' worth of data of dozens of columns. If that is what the user is starting with it is generally advisable to use some dataframes library or the tools/features provided by your shell to do the heavy data wrangling upfront before piping the data into incplot.  
  
### Plot types ###
Scatter plots tend to work better in smaller plot sizes (the dots are more 'densely' packed then which is typically visually nicer)  
  
(Multi)line plots tend to work better in larger plot sizes (fullscreen even)

Horizontal bar plots (stacked or regular) have most of their width fully dependant on the data itself (ie. number of rows and number of value series selected). In practice this is a limiting factor for many datasets when using these plot types because the terminal window 'runs outs of' columns very quickly.

Vertical bar plots have their height fully dependant on the data itself (similarly to horizontal bar plots). However, terminal windows can scroll and so this is considered non-problematic.

### Extreme values ###
The common case of having extreme values in the data that would normally prevent drawing 'nice' and useful plots can be taken care of with the optional [-e VAR] command line parameter which instructs incplot to filter out all observations (ie. rows) with any value above and below VAR standard deviations from mean. Defaults to [-e 6]. [-e 0] turns this feature off.

### HTML output ###
Incplot uses the same color schemes for HTML output as for the regular output to terminal. This is usually fine, but when one wants to include the plot created in another page, it may be advisable to force the background color to match the background of the including page. Incplot provides [-n VAR VAR VAR] command line parameter to specify the RGB color value to override the background used by incplot in HTML mode.
</details>

## Non-Features ##

* Will not work on terminal emulators without proper unicode support (those are arguably ancient)
* No data wrangling or analysis of any kind
* Doesn't offer 'all the plot types in existence', but rather just several of the most useful types
* Accepts flat numbers, strings and booleans only (ie. doesn't parse 'complex' data types such as date/time formats from string back into their numeric representation)
* Doesn't understand or work with 'units' (ie. 10km will be treated as string not value 10 with unit 'kilometers')
* No export of the rendered plot into other formats (such as pictures)
* Not guaranteed to work well on terminal emulators without (true) color support
* Doesn't (and cannot) make data 'look good' if the data is fundamentally unsuitable for plotting
* Doesn't (and cannot) show 100% visual accuracy due to inherent limitations of terminal interfaces

## Technical information ##

Most of technical details of how the tool works under the hood are described in [incplot-lib](https://github.com/InCom-0/incplot-lib) which is the underlying library implementing all the core features except those that are directly related to running in the terminal.<br><br>
In order to provide some of the more advanced features not commonly (or at all) found in other similar tools incplot employs a moderate number of direct and transitive dependencies.<br>
<i>Note: CMake build system of the project is setup such that it can build and use its entire dependency tree if need be (eg. on native Windows)</i>

<details>
<summary>Dependencies</summary>

#### Incplot uses the following external dependencies directly: ####
* [argparse](https://github.com/p-ranav/argparse) - Command line argument parsing
* [indicators](https://github.com/p-ranav/indicators) - Activity indicators for command line
* [sqlpp23](https://github.com/rbock/sqlpp23) - Using SQL in a sane way from C++.
     * [sqlite](https://github.com/sqlite/sqlite) - Storage (in incplot mostly for color schemes and fonts)

#### Incplot also uses the following external dependencies to support features related to HTML output and fonts: ####
* [ots](https://github.com/InCom-0/ots_cmake) - Font sanitization
* [incfontdisc](https://github.com/InCom-0/incfontdisc) - Cross-platform wrapper for discovering and using system fonts
* [cpr](https://github.com/libcpr/cpr) - Wrapper for libcurl so that it can be used in a sane way in 2025
     * [libcurl](https://github.com/curl/curl) - For transferring data using URI syntax
* [libarchive](https://github.com/InCom-0/libarchive_superbuild) - Dealing with compression archives

#### Transitive dependencies included through [incplot-lib](https://github.com/InCom-0/incplot-lib): ####
* [otfccxx](https://github.com/InCom-0/otfccxx) - Programmatic modifications of OpenType fonts.
     * [harfbuzz](https://github.com/harfbuzz/harfbuzz)
     * [otfcc_cmake](https://github.com/InCom-0/otfcc_cmake)
     * [fmem](https://github.com/InCom-0/fmem)
     * [WOFF2](https://github.com/InCom-0/woff2)
* [nlohmann_json](https://github.com/nlohmann/json) - JSON parsing
* [csv2](https://github.com/p-ranav/csv2) - CSV, TSV parsing
* [utf-cpp](https://github.com/ww898/utf-cpp) - Dealing with unicode conversions
* [incstd](https://github.com/InCom-0/incstd) - Header-only general C++ library
* [incerr](https://github.com/InCom-0/incerr) - Header-only library for error codes

</details>

## Building ##

Building incplot requires CMake and should be possible using the (appropriate) predefined CMake presets.</br>

* Uses cutting edge (as of December 2025) features from C++23 language as well as from C++23 STL extensively
* Compiles with GCC 14.2+ and Clang 20.1.3+ on Linux, MacOS
* Compiles with MSVC 19.44+, GCC 14.2+ (through MSYS2) and Clang 20.1.3+ (through MSYS2) on Windows
* It is almost certainly impossible to compile with the more exotic compilers and toolings (as they are lagging further behind the mainstream ones in standard implementation)
* These limitations will no doubt subside as time passes and implementations get fully up to speed on modern C++.

## License
This code is free to use under the terms of the [MIT license](https://github.com/InCom-0/incplot/blob/main/LICENSE.txt).

## Acknowledgement
Main inspirations drawn from: [YouPlot](https://github.com/red-data-tools/YouPlot) and [UnicodePlots.jl](https://github.com/JuliaPlots/UnicodePlots.jl).