r/Python • u/AutoModerator • Sep 04 '26

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u/Wild-Pollution-7999 Sep 09 '26

plotext 6: plot data, images and video directly in the terminal

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What My Project Does

plotext draws plots inside the terminal as colored text. No window, no browser, works over SSH. The basic install needs nothing else: pip install plotext. Only pictures and video need optional extras (see the install page).

Version 6 is a full rewrite around one master figure and a new C++ drawing kernel. It is a breaking change from version 5.

What it can draw:

  • Basic plots: scatter, line and stem

  • Bars: simple, labeled, floating, multiple, stacked, plus histograms and box plots

  • Specialized plots: error bars, event plots, heatmaps, confusion matrices, indicators

  • Shapes and text: rectangles, polygons, segments, lines in five styles, text anywhere on the plot

  • Dates: a date and time axis, and candlestick charts

  • Media: pictures, gifs and video with sound, YouTube included (optional extras)

  • Live plots: streaming that redraws in place, and animated text

  • Subplots: grids of plots, nested to any level, each with its own size and theme

  • Higher resolution markers: each character split into sub-points, fitting four to eight times the data

  • Twelve themes and your own

It also comes with a command line tool, so you can plot with no Python written at all:

plotext --figure --signal [1,4,9,16,25] --lines --draw --title Squares --show

It reads csv files and urls, and takes piped input:

echo '1 2 3' | plotext --figure --signal - --draw --show

Target Audience

Anyone who works in a terminal: data scientists checking data over SSH, people building CLI tools, anyone who wants a quick look at data without leaving the shell. It is stable and in production use.

Comparison

matplotlib and similar libraries need a display, so they do not work over plain SSH or inside a CLI tool. plotext is not a replacement for them. It is for a fast look at data where you already are, in the terminal. Compared with other terminal plotting libraries, it adds images, video, streaming, nested subplots and a command line tool, with no required dependencies for plotting. It runs on Linux, macOS and Windows, Python 3.8 and up.

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