textcharts¶

Beautiful text-based charts for your terminal — zero dependencies.

15 chart types with Unicode box-drawing, ANSI colors, and automatic terminal width detection. Pure Python, no external dependencies, Python 3.10+.

from textcharts import BoxPlot, BoxPlotSeries

downtown = [1825, 1900, 1980, 2100, 2250, 2400, 2550, 2710, 2980]
riverside = [1450, 1525, 1600, 1680, 1750, 1820, 1950, 2080, 2220]
midtown = [1650, 1710, 1780, 1840, 1920, 2010, 2140, 2280, 2450]

series = [
    BoxPlotSeries(name="Downtown", values=downtown),
    BoxPlotSeries(name="Riverside", values=riverside),
    BoxPlotSeries(name="Midtown", values=midtown),
]
chart = BoxPlot(
    series=series,
    title="Apartment Rents",
    subtitle="Monthly rent distribution by neighborhood",
)
print(chart.render())

Install¶

pip install textcharts

Features¶

Domain-neutral defaults — generic labels and titles out of the box. Add context with the subject parameter (e.g., subject="Query Latency" turns “Histogram” into “Query Latency Histogram”).

Adaptive rendering — auto-detects terminal width, color support, and Unicode capabilities. Falls back to ASCII-safe, plain-text output in non-interactive contexts.

Configurable at every level — ChartOptions controls color, width, theme, Unicode, and outlier capping. Per-chart parameters cover metric labels, improvement direction (lower_is_better), and value formatting.

Three interfaces — Python API, CLI (textcharts bar --title "Revenue"), and MCP server for AI tool use (pip install textcharts[mcp]).

Chart types¶

Chart	Class	Data model
Bar chart	`BarChart`	`BarData`
Histogram	`Histogram`	`HistogramBar`
Heatmap	`Heatmap`	matrix + labels
Box plot	`BoxPlot`	`BoxPlotSeries`
Line chart	`LineChart`	`LinePoint`
Scatter plot	`ScatterPlot`	`ScatterPoint`
Comparison bar	`ComparisonBar`	`ComparisonBarData`
Diverging bar	`DivergingBar`	`DivergingBarData`
Summary box	`SummaryBox`	`SummaryStats`
Percentile ladder	`PercentileLadder`	`PercentileData`
Normalized speedup	`NormalizedSpeedup`	`SpeedupData`
Stacked bar	`StackedBar`	`StackedBarData`
Sparkline table	`SparklineTable`	`SparklineTableData`
CDF chart	`CDFChart`	`CDFSeriesData`
Rank table	`RankTable`	`RankTableData`

See the Chart gallery for rendered screenshots of every chart type in color, greyscale, and monochrome modes.