Roadmapdocs

Towards version 1docs

Basic plot types:

[x] Scatter plots.
[x] Line plots (connect the dots).
[x] Image plots / matrix heatmaps.
[x] Function heatmap plots.
[x] Progress bars.
[x] Basic bar charts and column charts.
[x] Histograms.
[x] Box plots, filled or outlined, lying either way (boxes). Designed in the box-plots note.
[x] Candlestick plots. See the candlesticks note.
[x] candles moved onto what it shares with boxes, gaining a horizontal form as it went. See the box-plots note.

Basic plot furnishings:

[x] Basic text boxes.
[x] Borders.
[x] Axis ticks and tick labels for scatter plots.
[x] Axis labels and titles.
[ ] Labels and ticks for bar/column charts, histograms, candlesticks, box plots. See the categorical-axes note, notes/reference/myplot.py.
[x] Color bars.

Basic plot arrangement:

[x] Horizontal and vertical stacking.
[x] Naive layering plots on top of each other.
[x] Automatically wrapping plots into a grid.
[ ] Finalise operator assignment.

Styling plots with colors:

[x] Basic colormaps.
[x] BIDS colormaps.
[x] Rainbow colormap.
[x] Cyberpunk colormap.
[x] Discrete colour palettes.

Specifying colors:

[ ] Consistent API for color specification. See the color-specs note.
[ ] Configurable colour scales and normalisation. See the scales note.

Rendering:

[x] Render to string / terminal with ANSI control codes.
[x] Export to image with pixel font.

Basic code improvements:

[x] Split up monolithic file into a small number of modules.
[x] A window value type for the mapping from data coordinates onto the grid, used by axes. See the plot-windows note.
[x] Comprehensive type annotations, static type checking with mypy.
[ ] Basic input validation and error handling.

Testing:

[x] Unit tests for core modules (colors, colormaps, data, core).
[x] Integration tests (all examples run).

Documentation:

[x] Minimal docstrings for everything user-facing.
[x] Quick start guide.
[ ] Complete docstrings for modules, constants, etc.
[x] Everything exported from the package.
[ ] Private parsers and constants too.
[x] Simple generated markdown documentation on GitHub.
[x] Simple generated HTML/CSS documentation, hosted on web.

Repository:

[x] Set up project, installable via git.
[x] A simple example for the quick-start guide.
[x] Changelog.
[x] Version numbering and keep main branch working.
[ ] List on PyPI (when we agree we have reached version 1).

Advanced featuresdocs

More exotic plot types:

[x] Calendar heatmap plots:
[x] Month-chunked calendar (calendar).
[x] Github contributions-style continuous calendar (weeks).
[x] Tables (see the tables note):
[x] List of dictionaries.
[x] Dictionary of lists.
[x] 2d list with/without header.
[x] Configurable format strings.
[ ] Vector field plots:
[x] color (vfunction2), including domain colouring of complex functions (cfunction2).
[ ] line (see boids example). See the quiver-plots note.
[ ] Hilbert curves (see the hilbert-curves note):
[x] Basic Hilbert curves.
[ ] Non-square Hilbert curves.
[ ] 3d Hilbert curves.
[ ] World maps (see the world-maps note; examples/world_map.py and examples/globe.py prototype the design, carrying their own coarse coastlines):
[ ] Some 2d projections.
[ ] 3d globe projection.
[ ] Whether to bundle coastline vectors, and at what resolution.
[ ] Dashboard meters (similar to progress):
[ ] circular
[ ] vertical
[ ] ticking-number
[ ] Scrolling text marquees

Advancements of basic plot types:

[x] Advanced scatter plots:
[x] Different colours for each point.
[x] Multiple point clouds on a single scatter plot.
[x] 3d scatter plots.
[x] Advanced line plots (See the lines note).
[x] Configurable stroke thickness, with round caps and filled joins.
[x] Gaps, where a coordinate is non-finite.
[x] 3d line plots / wireframes.
[ ] Advanced bar charts:
[x] Bar/column charts with configurable sizes and spacing.
[ ] Bar/column charts with other alignments.
[x] Bar/column charts with individual colours.
[ ] Negative values in bar/column charts.
[ ] Advanced heatmaps:
[ ] RGB-channel 2d histograms (see hist2d_rgb in notes/reference/myplot.py).
[ ] Advanced image options:
[ ] Integer-factor down- and upsampling.
[x] A plot that normalises values onto the colormap itself (heatmap).
[ ] Nonlinear normalisation. See the scales note.
[ ] Advanced text formatting parser (rich=True or something):
[ ] Bold, italic, underline, based on markdown?
[ ] Some way of specifying colors, html-style tags?

Advanced plot arrangement:

[x] Animation context manager (animate), owning the printing state. See the animations note.
[x] Opt-in frame timing, drift corrected, with the frame's own render and write time inside its budget.
[x] Opt-in frame collection, reporting the achieved frame rate.
[x] A way to print from inside a running animation without corrupting it, as a method (anim.print) and as a stream (anim.out).
[x] Temporal stacking (tstack): animations as first-class values.
[x] Indexing, slicing and mapping over frames.
[x] Padding frames to a common size, so an animation cannot jitter.
[x] Building one straight from an array with a time axis (animation).
[ ] Operator for temporal stacking.
[ ] Per-frame durations.
[ ] Mapping over the other composites, hstack and friends. See the mapping-over-composites note.
[ ] Indexing and slicing of plots.
[ ] Crop plot composition primitive. See the terminal-aware-printing note.
[ ] Clip plots to terminal width and (almost) height (see docs/src/compatibility.md).
[ ] animate context manager should handle this, and window resizes.

Advanced furnishings:

[ ] Axis transformations (e.g. logarithmic scale).
[ ] Axis segments (see the axis-series note).
[x] Axes on any subset of the four sides, each blank, ruled, or ruled with ticks and labels, so that a colorbar can be labelled without a full border. See the axes-sides note.
[x] Text embedded in borders.
[ ] Colorbars automatically derive colormap. See the scales note.

Advanced rendering:

[x] Export animations to gifs, at the requested or the achieved frame rate.
[x] Control over the palette sharing and size. See the gif-size note.
[x] Automatically optimise saved gifs (lossless compression). See the gif-size note.

Backend improvements:

[x] Upgrade Char backend to use arrays of codepoints and colors.
[x] Vectorised composition operations.
[x] Vectorised bitmap rendering.
[x] Intelligent ANSI rendering (only include necessary control codes and resets, e.g., if several characters in a row use the same colours).
[x] Differential rendering with shortcut plot_new - plot_old.
[ ] Vectorised animations (3-D CharArray, codes[T,H,W]). See the animations note.

Code organisation:

[ ] Split up plotting module with one file per plot family.

Advanced testing:

[x] Tests that drive a virtual terminal for testing ANSI control codes (see the terminal-test-backend note).
[x] hand-written emulator (retired)
[x] tmux
[ ] More virtual terminal test backends
[ ] zmx (backed by ghostty-vt)
[ ] pyte and friends
[ ] more?
[x] Test the set of escape sequences we emit.
[x] Regression testing for str output and image output of examples (See the example-snapshot-tests note).
[ ] Test that a type alias named in a public signature is reachable as mp.something. Derivable, but blocked on number. See the export-policy note.

Support non-24-bit-colour modes:

[ ] Reduced-colour modes (See docs/src/compatibility.md.)
[ ] Colormaps that are legible in a reduced-colour mode.

Longer termdocs

Further plot enhancements:

[ ] More advanced line plots:
[ ] Error bars on line plots.
[ ] Fill plots.
[ ] Dashed/dotted strokes (allows animated lines if we advance the start index)
[ ] Advanced wireframes:
[ ] An explicit edge list, so a mesh with shared vertices is projected once per vertex rather than once per wire through it.
[ ] Hidden line removal, or some depth ordering. Colouring by depth is the stand-in for now.
[ ] Legend construction (API needs thought).
[ ] Better and more flexible border parameterisation.

More rendering formats:

[ ] Render plots to SVG (keep console aesthetic).
[ ] Render plots to PDF (keep console aesthetic).
[ ] Render plots to TikZ/pgfplots source.

Advanced glyphs and fonts:

[ ] Fallback for terminals whose font lacks braille.
[ ] Opt-in octants (Symbols for Legacy Computing Supplement, U+1CC00–U+1CEBF, new in Unicode 16.0) as an alternative to braille.
[ ] Instructions for installing or patching a font that has them.
[ ] Other font extensions, creating new density and shape possibilities?

Roadmapdocs

Towards version 1docs

Advanced featuresdocs

Longer termdocs

Related workdocs