Spark: Sparklines in your shell
git.zx2c4.comSite seems to be hugged to death. https://web.archive.org/web/20260830100336/https://git.zx2c4...
The web archive link, made available since the featured page has been hugged to death, has been hugged to death.
A møøse once DDOSed my site...
Or it maybe rejects invalid Referer: header? Try https://git.zx2c4.com/ directly from browser
It is available but sometimes got rate limit due to AI crisis
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.
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.
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).
Teletext also has the “smooth” characters that have inclined lines. I’d need to take a good look at them to understand how to use them, but if you can lose the vertical precision, it’s OK, because you pack more in the horizontal axis.
As for Braille, the last Unicode standard added Kaypro’s 2x4 mosaics, so we can stop misusing Braille for that (a huge relief to me, because the banding that often happens always annoys me).
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.
I made one of these in AWK because I have an AWK problem and it may be an addiction. Send help.
Jokes aside this is always a good thing, the ability to roughly visualize graphs real quick can be really useful for sysadmins, data-massagers and other nerds. If you don't use this or the alternatives suggested in the comments code your own! Make your logs, analysis tools and other visualizations prettier! Add colors or other bells and whistles at your convenience!
I really like the very concept of sparklines, if you can't tell.
Big up Edward Tufte
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.
is this some meta commentary on cgit's performance? (site doesn't load)