Exporting plots

[cool-RR]

What's the latest and greatest about exporting plots? I found this old thread but I wonder if there are new solutions. I basically want to do a regular plot in VisiData and then launch a command that uses matplotlib or similar to create an image of a plot with the same data on the desktop.

[frosencrantz]

Wondering if @hoclun-rigsep or @daviewales have any updates they want to share.

[daviewales]

I haven't done anything since this (creates Vega-lite charts):
#1895

[midichef]

Visidata has a builtin graph feature using seaborn, which is based on matplotlib. To use it, you can try to run the existing command plot-column-ext. It's like the the default plot that uses . aka plot-column. To use it you have to first install seaborn .

I haven't tried it, as I couldn't get seaborn working on my system, in its test/demo scripts (i.e. standalone seaborn, not called from within visidata).

[midichef]

update: I got seaborn working from within visidata. On Ubuntu24.04, it was failing silently to draw graphs. pip install pyqt6 fixed it. Here's a plot from within visidata, using plot-column-ext:

Data labels are drawn on top of the graph and can hide data, especially when there are many labels. It does seems seaborn tries a series of a few different coordinates for the labels, (corners, bottom center, top center), to avoid obscuring graph data points if possible.

[cool-RR]

Thank you. Didn't work for me for some reason. In any case, the way it's supposed to work where it shows the plot in the current graphical session, would inherently not be a good fit for me, because I often work through SSH. I'll probably implement my own command. I'll also want a command that's invoked after a VisiData plot was generated, so it could use all the information from that. Thank you anyway.

[daviewales]

@cool-RR, did you see my vega-lite saver? You could likely adapt something similar to convert the current chart to a vega-lite spec JSON file. Currently, you specify the vega-lite encoding channels on the columns in a regular data sheet, then save the sheet with a .vegalite extension, which should work OK over SSH. You'd then need to either copy-paste or scp the file to another machine where you can view the vega-lite spec as a chart. (The easiest way would be to paste it into the only vega-editor. You could also use Altair. (A less hacky version of my saver would use Altair rather than just manually constructing a JSON file...)

[cool-RR]

Thanks Davie. I see it's for columns, while I need a solution for plots. I'll work on my solution.

[cool-RR]

I implemented it. Code.

VisiData plot:

Exported plot:

It also exports the reflines.

[cool-RR]

I've been adding more functionality to this script. I'm quite proud of it.