Bbv (for "bare-bones viewer") is a minimalist data plotter/viewer for the command line. Bbv is best suited for a quick look at functional relations gathered during exploratory data analysis.

Bbv uses stdin as input and must be called from a pipe of shell commands:

command_1 | command_2 | ... | bbv

The data must be tab-separated, and there is only one option, x.

Piping your data into bbv will produce a line plot column by column. For example:

Piping your data into bbv x will produce a scatter plot of pairwise (x, y) values. For example:

Bbv, being written in POSIX shell and awk, requires only a functioning POSIX system and does not tie you to any extra toolchain. You can use any lightweight image viewer as back end, provided it reads the SVG format. Possible candidates are, in alphabetical order:

• eom (Eye of MATE)
• feh
• imv
• loupe (GNOME Image Viewer)
• pqiv
• sxiv | nsxiv
• viewnior
• vimiv

All of these viewers open SVGs, permit image zooming (+/-), and allow you to use keyboard arrows for paning. Some of these viewers also accept vim-like shortcuts (h, j, k, l) for arrows.

Bbv does not support real-time plotting of a long-term running process. If dynamic plotting of a data stream is your use case, you will be better served by feedgnuplot.

• Download the provided bbv file.

• Make the file executable (chmod +x bbv) and put it into your PATH.

• Specify your image back end via the environment variable, BBV_BACKEND.

For example, if you want to use imv as image viewer, write the following:

export BBV_BACKEND='imv'

in your .bashrc or equivalent.

You can include command-line options in what you specify as bbv's back end. For example:

export BBV_BACKEND='imv -c overlay'

Typing bbv directly in the terminal will print a short help on usage.

Otherwise, usage is from a pipe, ... | bbv [x], x being optional.

The ranges of the resulting plot are the minima and maxima of your dataset. While plotting, bbv skips missing values and non-numeric values.

It goes without saying that there are no options for titles, annotations, legends, custom axes, axis transformations, custom labels, ticks, colors, styles, plot types, and so on.

The file that bbv produces from stdin (and that is opened by your chosen back end) is saved in your working directory as tmp_bbv.svg. This is a regular SVG file, fully editable in Inkscape (for example).

MIT