x_x: The Dead Guy CLI

With barely a week left for this site, I’m beginning to trim away programs that I just probably won’t get to, by virtue of time or technical dilemmas. I’m also making a conscious effort to pick out titles that amuse me in one form or another, so I finish with happy memories. 😛

x_x, which I mentally refer to as “the Dead Guy CLI,” because the home page uses that as a subtitle, is a rather nifty tool that I’m surprised I haven’t seen covered elsewhere. Using a bland, dull, boring Excel spreadsheet borrowed from a corner of the Interweb, Dead Guy CLI transmogrifies it into this:

Well isn’t that clever.

Dead Guy CLI gives you a small measure of control over your output, by allowing you to specify a header row or allow for special encoding. It also works with CSV files, so you’re not strapped trying to convert back and forth to Excel, just to fiddle with x_x.

Aside from that though, Dead Guy CLI seems very simple. Of course, your spreadsheet may need some management if you expect it to fit into a certain dimension, but I am confident that as a skilled and capable member of the information age, you won’t throw a wobbly over a pear-shaped spreadsheet.

Keep x_x in mind when you’re thinking about things like csv2xls or xlhtml, since it may save you a step or prevent you from relying on graphical tools just to extract data from a spreadsheet. And of course, if you’re working with csv files, x_x could supplement what tabview or other tools can do.

For my own recordkeeping, Dead Guy CLI gets points for doing something obvious that I don’t recall seeing elsewhere. And also for the snarky name. I’m a fan of snarky names. 😈

textprint: Visually impressive, in only 18K

You can get graphing and plotting functions in the console from a variety of sources. textprint is easily my favorite for simple data arrays, mostly because it can do this, with only 18K:

  

textprint takes a flat data file as input, and arranges it graphically to fit the terminal without distorting the image. From there, textprint goes from zero-to-60, in about two seconds.

Because on top of a rather bland plotting display, you have the option to pick between about four or five different graphs, including the bar and column charts you see above, and a couple others.

And then, you can shift those displays along the x or y axes, zoom the displays and even “print” the display to a text file that matches what you see on the screen. (I did see some corruption when trying to zoom in too “close,” though.)

So you have essentially a tool to convert data arrays into visual representations, adjust them to your liking, then “print” them in their new format. And all that in only 18K.

textprint is not without shortcomings, but truth be told, I could sift through anything and find small nits to pick at. Color options would be nice, and while it does have onboard help, there aren’t any flag options that I can see. If I could send commands to textprint and have it spit out a “printed” file without the interface, textprint would be doubly useful.

And to be honest, the title “textprint” is a slight misnomer. That’s going to get lost in the endless array of pdf converters, ASCII readers and document translators that already pepper the ‘web. It needs a more accurate, and more descriptive title.

It’s still exceptionally impressive though. And the fact that it has so many options in such a small space. And seeing that it’s a dozen years old and still working is noteworthy too.

Not in Arch/AUR or Debian that I could find. textprint is bundled with a precompiled binary, but it’s going to look for an ncurses library that didn’t exist on my Arch system. The command to compile it is in the readme.txt file.