[hinkley]

I spent a hot second last year thinking about sparklines in a terminal, and it seemed to me that unicode could use some more glyphs to improve this situation of treating a single glyph as a modest array of pixels. I don't know what I googled for, but for some reason I found only about 1/3rd of the characters listed in the final two lines of

http://tamivox.org/dave/boxchar/index.html

Unless I'm wrong about your demo, it seems like you are using some of these? There's a 2x2 pixel grid, and some characters that would be good for bar charts, both horizontal and vertical, and also with negative numbers. That's better than I thought we had, but not a big palette to work with.

Are you aware of any proposals to expand the pixel art capabilities of Unicode? Grids have the problem of requiring 2^(X x Y) characters to represent all states, but diacritical marks don't have that scaling problem. For example it would take 64 characters to represent a 2x3 grid of all on/off states, whereas a 6x8 grid of rectangular diacritical marks would only take 48 glyphs.

[olavolav]

That's right, I'm using the 2x2 characters and some off-center horizontal line characters.

Note aware of Unicode expansions, though more and more fonts seem to support the above.

Sparklines in the terminal sounds very cool, did you end up coding something?

Note that one other popular alternative (see for example the Unicode plotting lib for Julia) is using Braille characters, which probably have an even better support across fonts

[hinkley]

> Sparklines in the terminal sounds very cool, did you end up coding something?

It seemed to me that the existing tools were about as good as I was going to achieve on my own. I got distracted from my use case and will have to circle back, hopefully soon.