BRAILLEGRAPH(1)

🎀 NAME 🎀

braillegraph — bestie, it's a simple histogram tool that produces text output ✨

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💅 SYNOPSIS 💅

braillegraph <data series

psql -At -c 'select ...' |braillegraph

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

okay so braillegraph takes a single data series and plots them, and the way it does it is genuinely unhinged: it abuses the Braille range (U+2800..U+28FF) 💀 it's giving "no thoughts, just dots" but make it genius.

here's the tea — it's able to display two values per a horizontal character, which means a plain text mail can hold an X range up to ~150 data points 🌈 The vertical resolution is 4/character, so a reasonable Y range is up to 80ish 👑

By default, no scaling is done at all — one dot is exactly one data point horizontally, a value of 1 vertically. lowkey the most honest graph you'll ever meet 💖

Input is given as one non-negative integer per line. that's it, that's the whole vibe.

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🌸 EXAMPLE 🌸

psql bugs -A -t -c "
select
    count(case when arch='amd64 (x86_64)' then 1 else null end)
    *80/count(*)
from (select arch, date_trunc('month', timestamp) as month from si) m
group by month
order by month
"|braillegraph

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✨ OPTIONS ✨

• -h, --horizontal — Horizontal layout 💫 The Y axis is left-to-right, X axis is top-to-bottom. it's the same graph, just doing a lil rotate, main character energy.
• -m, --max number — Force the target range of the data 🎯 Normally, the histogram will be auto-sized based on the largest value in the input; this option sets the max to a fixed value. It will result either in empty space on the graph or in values over the limit being hard-capped 🙈

You typically want this option when comparing multiple histograms, or when continuously updating the display. fr fr, it's the "keep it consistent bestie" flag.

• -y, --y-scale number — Scale the data so that the graph takes a given size (measured in dots) instead of varying on the data given 📏 The size in characters is ¼ the dot size on a vertical graph, ½ on horizontal. math is mathing, and it's mathing precisely.

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💀 CAVEATS 💀

Versions of FreeFont older than end of 2016 make any Braille glyphs (both for legitimate uses and for brailleimg) totally unreadable at pixel sizes commonly found in computer displays — ie, anything but HiDPI and/or very large text sizes 😭 Alas, this font is commonly configured as primary fallback in default setups shipped by distributions. so if your graph looks like soup, it's not you, it's the font, periodt.

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👑 AUTHOR 👑

Adam Borowski <kilobyte@angband.pl>

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and that's the whole page bestie 🫶 this iconic lil manual is the braillegraph page, dated 2021-08-22 — go plot something pretty, you got this 💖✨