what's the point in all these terminal programs posted here every day? why would i ever draw stuff with text when it's just going to be converted back to pixels by the OS anyway? there's clearly a bigger reason than just being able to do stuff without the slow desktop environment. but what is it?
> there's clearly a bigger reason than just being able to do stuff without the slow desktop environment. but what is it?
For me, it’s visualisation of data on a remote HPC cluster. Shuffling data back and forth is dangerous because then everything is duplicated and you never know where the latest version is. SSH tunnels and remote X sessions are finicky and in several contexts blocked intentionally or not. Sixels are perfect: the plots are accurate enough to actually see what’s going on, nothing is moved around, and it works with a wobbly VPN server over some dodgy wifi (or 3G).
totally, and most significantly: without having to shuffle a table off to another app to then be graphed. I definitely see high value in this for when you are doing adhoc analysis of some data (such as logs) and want to see the items which stand out. It's easier to recognize some patterns visually for sure. sort/uniq -c/awk are great, but when measuring things relative to other things, visualizations are powerful for humans.
Aside from the convenience of having the output exactly where you're issuing commands, and the ability to copy-paste the output into text documents (admittedly not without its rough spots), I frequently find unexpected uses for things like grep, sort, uniq, etc. - standard unix tools at the command line, even for supposedly purely visual output.
As an example, for the last chart shown:
cat gencode.v35.annotation.gff3 \
| grep -v '#' | grep 'gene' | cut -f1 \
| uplot count -t "The number of human gene annotations per chromosome" -c blue
| sort
gives an alphabetical ordering, rather than by descending count. Or you could search only for a single row of interest, or filter out duplicates, or ....
