How to Plot in the Terminal with Python and Textualize

Have you ever wanted to create a plot or graph in your terminal? Okay, maybe you haven’t, but now that you know you can, you want to! Python has the plotext package for plotting in your terminal. However, while that package is amazing all on its own, there is another package called textual-plotext that wraps the plotext package so you can use it in Textual!

In this tutorial, you will learn the basics of creating a plot in your terminal using the textual-plotext package!

Installation

Your first step in your plotting adventure is to install textual-plotext. You can install the package using pip. Open up your terminal and run the following command:

python -m pip install textual-plotext

Pip will install textual-plotext and any dependencies it needs. Once that’s done, you’re ready to start plotting!

Usage

To kick things off, you’ll create a simple Textual application with a scatter chart in it. This example comes from the textual-plotext GitHub repo. You can create a Python file and name it something like scatterplot.py and then add the following code:

from textual.app import App, ComposeResult

from textual_plotext import PlotextPlot

class ScatterApp(App[None]):

    def compose(self) -> ComposeResult:
        yield PlotextPlot()

    def on_mount(self) -> None:
        plt = self.query_one(PlotextPlot).plt
        y = plt.sin() # sinusoidal test signal
        plt.scatter(y)
        plt.title("Scatter Plot") # to apply a title

if __name__ == "__main__":
    ScatterApp().run()

When you run this code, you will see the following in your terminal:

Plotext does more than scatterplots though. You can create any of the following:

Let’s look at a bar plot example:

from textual.app import App, ComposeResult

from textual_plotext import PlotextPlot

class BarChartApp(App[None]):

    def compose(self) -> ComposeResult:
        yield PlotextPlot()

    def on_mount(self) -> None:
        languages = ["Python", "C++", "PHP", "Ruby", "Julia", "COBOL"]
        percentages = [14, 36, 11, 8, 7, 4]
        plt = self.query_one(PlotextPlot).plt
        y = plt.bar(languages, percentages)
        plt.scatter(y)
        plt.title("Programming Languages") # to apply a title

if __name__ == "__main__":
    BarChartApp().run()

The main difference here is that you’ll be calling plt.bar() with some parameters, whereas, in the previous example, you called plt.sin()with no parameters at all. Of course, you also need some data to plot for this second example. The provided data is all made up.

When you run this example, you will see something like the following:

Isn’t that neat?

Wrapping Up

You can create many other plots with Plotext. Check out their documentation and give some of the other plots a whirl. Have fun and make cool things in your terminal today!