sparky

I have played with the idea of displaying statistics about version control systems in a Unix shell, and I also wanted to improve my command line skills.

Before starting, I remembered spark, a project that generates sparklines for a set of data, so I became interested in trying an alternative Groovy implementation to have fun.

Sparklines for your shell: Groovy flavored

My project is sparky, a Groovy script that lets you graph tiny sparkline graphs from your command line.

sparky takes a list of numbers—comma-delimited or spaces—and then prints a sparkline out of it. It’s designed to be used in conjunction with other scripts that can output in that format.

$ sparky 1 5 22 13 53
▁▁▃▂▇

$ sparky 0,30,55,80,33,150
▁▂▃▅▂▇

$ echo 9 13 5 17 1 | sparky
▄▆▂█▁

Practical examples

There are many possibilities. Here are two examples.

Number of commits to the groovy-core Git repository, by author:

$ git shortlog -s |
> awk '{print $1}' |
> sparky
▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▃▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▂▁▁▄▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▅▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁█▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁

Code visualization. The number of characters of sparky itself, by line, ignoring empty lines:

$ awk '{ print length($0) }' sparky |
> grep -v ^0$ |
> sparky
▂▂▁▁▃▁▃▂▃▃▃▂▁▁▂▄▁▄▅▅█▅▂▁▁▃▃▅▁▁▃▂▁▁▇▃▁

Try it!

June 17, 2012 | @ArturoHerrero