HACKER Q&A
📣 hardwaresofton

What do you use to quickly generate charts & graphs?


At some point you get some data, and you want to graph it -- I'm curious what tools you reach for.

Interested mostly in the simple cases (let's say an XY graph, benchmark results, pie charts, etc), not exploration of the visual space per-say or trying to create a new type of visualization.

There are at least a few workflows I can think of but none are really satisfying/feel right:

- Open up LibreOffice/Excel/Google Sheets/Numbers, enter data, click around

- Open your terminal, try and remember gnuplot syntax

- Open a website like plotly and copy in your data

- Open up observable/ipynb or some other advanced notebook

What is everyone using?

On the startup front, it looks like of course companies like quickchart have been out there solving exactly this problem for 5 years already (that business has to be quite nice and profitable at this point!)

BTW, note that mermaid looks to include some simple syntax soon:

http://mermaid.js.org/syntax/xyChart.html

IMO once this new chart type percolates it's way into GitHub or other widely-used platforms that support markdown with mermaid, this problem is ~solved (at least for me) and that's what I'll use.


  👤 bjourne Accepted Answer ✓
I use matplotlib/seaborn/plotly-express to generate the figure and write a png. That way I can easily refine the figure once it goes from "trivial" to "complex": customize dpi, axis titles and ticks, latex in labels, annotating the line plots, etc. I'm picky about such details so often what should be easy becomes hard.

👤 pseudo_meta
I love the minimalistic approach of ascii charts:

  Apples         xxxxxxxxxxxxx------- 100
  Bananas        xxxxxxxxxx----------  75
  Oranges        xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 150
  Grapes         xxx-----------------  25
  Pineapples     x-------------------  10
  Watermelons    xxxxxx--------------  50
- https://mrrartpro.com/

- and as Obsidian plugin: https://github.com/alincoop/obsidian-tinychart


👤 cung
I’ve liked using https://draw.io

👤 constantinum
Google sheets for quick barcharts.

Pandas + Seaborn for complex graphs with multiple data points.


👤 Crier1002
mermaidjs is my default go-to. it works super well with Claude 3.5 if you ask it to visualize in mermaidjs syntax

👤 gaws
R + ggplot

👤 leros
Export to CSV and make a chart in Google Sheets.

👤 082349872349872
for histograms: stacked '#'s in a tty

👤 ArkimPhiri
I find Google sheets quick and easy.

👤 chrism238
Google charts

👤 jeffreygoesto
gnuplot

👤 talldayo
matplotlib