Terminal Charts with Victory CLI

August 29, 2016
Ken Wheeler

> The ability to collect, analyze, triangulate and visualize vast amounts of data in real time is something the human race has never had before. > -Rick Smolan After pushing out `webpack-dashboard` and seeing how much people enjoy terminal based tooling, I thought perhaps I should see what else I can explore in this space. [Formidable](/)’s ReactJS based data visualization library [Victory](/open-source/victory/) seemed like an awesome candidate for a command line render target. I saw a project, [hyperchart](https://github.com/mathisonian/hyperchart), by Matthew Conlen, that allowed users to generate interactive Victory charts into [hyperterm-window](https://github.com/mathisonian/hyperterm-window). This looked awesome, but I was looking for a way to expand the feature set and operate in a broader range of TERMs. I had also seen some ascii/ansi style visualizations in [blessed-contrib](https://github.com/yaronn/blessed-contrib) while building `webpack-dashboard`, and they seemed super cool, but porting would be too much of a challenge given the differences in APIs. Of course, ascii/ansi style charts didn’t seem practical for the mainstream use case. Then I realized something, Victory outputs valid SVG markup. This, coupled with `ReactDOM.renderToString` actually makes command line chart generation really easy. I got to work on it, and today I’m happy to announce the initial release of [Victory CLI](https://github.com/FormidableLabs/victory-cli)! Victory CLI is an easy to use command line interface for generating and displaying Victory based data visualizations. It can: * Render a variety of chart types * Use built in themes * Render to PNG * Render to SVG * Display PNG renders in iTerm3 * Take a custom JSON data input * Take a custom component script input to render from Check it out in action: ![Victory Command Line Interface displaying Victory based data visualizations](https://res.cloudinary.com/formidablelabs/image/upload/f\_auto,q\_auto/v1675121564/dotcom/assets-uploads-2016-08-cli) If you think this is cool and want to give it a try just `npm install -g victory-cli` and head over to [https://github.com/FormidableLabs/victory-cli\](https://github.com/FormidableLabs/victory-cli) to get started!

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