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Why would you want to do something like this for visualizing data instead of using ggplot or matplotlib (or really anything that can get you a real image instea

Why would you want to do something like this for visualizing data instead of using ggplot or matplotlib (or really anything that can get you a real image instead of ascii?)

polm23 6y ago
In my personal experience, the visualization in visidata is nice but secondary to the exploratory data slicing you can do. It's not like a not terrible keyboard driven Excel.
benhurmarcel 6y ago
The real interest is in manipulating the data, not just plotting it. Actually after manipulating, if you need to produce a plot the tools you mention can be used.
TeMPOraL 6y ago
This isn't a tool for visualizing data (in the sense of plotting graphs) - the capability is just an icing on the cake. It's a tool for exploring, analyzing, summarizing and modifying tabular data that's lightweight, versatile, and much more ergonomic than anything else out there (by virtue of a keyboard-oriented UI).
ph1l337 6y ago
My main use case for this is: I get some random data file thrown at me. Could be json, csv, xlsx anything that has data that can somehow be interpreted somewhat tabular and I want to find out quickly what's going on. You can really go from not knowing what's in a file to a decent understanding in less than a minute.
- IanCal 6y ago
  Here's a quick example from today of why I find it such a general purpose tool Pipe in some fixed-width formatted data kubectl get pods | vd -f fixed - Gives me a searchable, usable output. Press right to highlight the status column, shift-f and I get a count (+histogram) of the statuses. Three have failed. Hit enter on that row and I can see specifically which ones have failed. This takes a few seconds (I just tried and did it under 5 from running the above command). If I knew I wanted the failed ones I could have grepped or similar but I can then order by most restarts, etc. This is a tiny part of the functionality but it's an example of "there's some tabular-ish data but what's there?". Load X, histogram, filter, sort is probably 90% of my use-cases.
  - ph1l337 6y ago
    I haven't even thought about using it that way. Super cool, will do in the future. > Load X, histogram, filter, sort is probably 90% of my use-cases. Exaclty! Same for me.

Why would you want to do something like this for visualizing data instead of using ggplot or matplotlib (or really anything that can get you a real image instead of ascii?)

polm23 6y ago

In my personal experience, the visualization in visidata is nice but secondary to the exploratory data slicing you can do. It's not like a not terrible keyboard driven Excel.

benhurmarcel 6y ago

The real interest is in manipulating the data, not just plotting it. Actually after manipulating, if you need to produce a plot the tools you mention can be used.

TeMPOraL 6y ago

This isn't a tool for visualizing data (in the sense of plotting graphs) - the capability is just an icing on the cake. It's a tool for exploring, analyzing, summarizing and modifying tabular data that's lightweight, versatile, and much more ergonomic than anything else out there (by virtue of a keyboard-oriented UI).

ph1l337 6y ago

My main use case for this is: I get some random data file thrown at me. Could be json, csv, xlsx anything that has data that can somehow be interpreted somewhat tabular and I want to find out quickly what's going on. You can really go from not knowing what's in a file to a decent understanding in less than a minute.

IanCal 6y ago
Here's a quick example from today of why I find it such a general purpose tool Pipe in some fixed-width formatted data kubectl get pods | vd -f fixed - Gives me a searchable, usable output. Press right to highlight the status column, shift-f and I get a count (+histogram) of the statuses. Three have failed. Hit enter on that row and I can see specifically which ones have failed. This takes a few seconds (I just tried and did it under 5 from running the above command). If I knew I wanted the failed ones I could have grepped or similar but I can then order by most restarts, etc. This is a tiny part of the functionality but it's an example of "there's some tabular-ish data but what's there?". Load X, histogram, filter, sort is probably 90% of my use-cases.
- ph1l337 6y ago
  I haven't even thought about using it that way. Super cool, will do in the future. > Load X, histogram, filter, sort is probably 90% of my use-cases. Exaclty! Same for me.