Ask HN: 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.
I love the minimalistic approach of ascii charts:
- https://mrrartpro.com/- and as Obsidian plugin: https://github.com/alincoop/obsidian-tinychart
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.
Interesting combination -- thanks for sharing!
So if I'm understanding right you reach for matplotlib first?
Nah, for plotly. But matplotlib is part of my toolbox for figures that plotly doesn't handle well, such as image grids.
I’ve liked using https://draw.io
Huge fan of draw.io... I did not know they did graphs!
Just checked it out and it's quite manual -- as in you draw the bars on the bar chart! Not quite what I was looking for but interesting that they do this.
Google sheets for quick barcharts.
Pandas + Seaborn for complex graphs with multiple data points.
mermaidjs is my default go-to. it works super well with Claude 3.5 if you ask it to visualize <something> in mermaidjs syntax
Thanks -- yeah mermaid is pretty awesome, and the integration into markdown (in many places) really makes it even better.
R + ggplot
Export to CSV and make a chart in Google Sheets.
I find Google sheets quick and easy.
for histograms: stacked '#'s in a tty
Google charts
gnuplot
matplotlib