LiveChartsCore.Console.Cli 2.1.0-dev-798

lvc — LiveCharts in your terminal

Render LiveCharts charts in the terminal from a JSON spec. Designed for shell pipelines and AI-driven clients (Claude Code, MCP-aware agents, anything that can shell out) that want animated, interactive-quality charts without integrating the .NET library directly.

Status: experimental. The console rendering backend is part of the LiveCharts2 console-renderer experiment and the JSON schema may shift before 1.0.

Install

dotnet tool install -g LiveChartsCore.Console.Cli

Requires the .NET 8 runtime. After install, lvc is on your PATH.

Optional: install the Claude Code skill

lvc ships with a Claude Code skill (render-chart) that teaches Claude when to use inline plain-mode rendering versus spawning an interactive window. Drop it into your home ~/.claude/skills/ with:

lvc --install-skill

This writes ~/.claude/skills/render-chart/SKILL.md. Re-run after dotnet tool update -g LiveChartsCore.Console.Cli to pick up any skill revisions in the new version. Honors $CLAUDE_HOME if set.

To remove the skill (e.g., before dotnet tool uninstall -g):

lvc --uninstall-skill

No-op if the skill isn't installed; removes the parent directory only if it's empty so user-authored files in ~/.claude/skills/render-chart/ are left alone.

For GitHub Copilot users: there's no equivalent skill format; paraphrase the relevant decision tree from the SKILL.md into your project's .github/copilot-instructions.md by hand.

Usage

echo '{"kind":"line","series":[{"values":[1,2,3,4,3,2,1]}]}' | lvc

lvc --json '{"kind":"pie","title":"Slices","series":[{"name":"A","values":[1]},{"name":"B","values":[3]}]}'

lvc --file chart.json --mode sixel

Render mode auto-detects: Sixel if the terminal advertises it via DA1 (modern xterm, WezTerm, foot, mintty 3+, mlterm, Black Box, Konsole 25.04+, Windows Terminal 1.22+), otherwise Braille — which renders on any UTF-8 terminal. Override with --mode halfblock|braille|sixel|auto.

Width / height in cells default to the current terminal; override with --width N / --height N (or set them in the JSON spec).

--no-color for LLM / agent consumers

Pass --no-color (or set the NO_COLOR env var) to emit plain Braille / half-block glyphs with no ANSI escapes. Useful when stdout is read by something that doesn't paint terminal control sequences — an LLM tool result, a JSON log line, a code-review snapshot:

lvc --json '{"kind":"line","series":[{"values":[1,2,3,4,3,2,1]}]}' --no-color

--no-color implies Braille (or honors --mode halfblock if given); combining it with --mode sixel is an error since Sixel encodes pixels into escape sequences and has no plain form.

JSON spec

{
  "kind": "line",
  "title": "optional",
  "width": 80,
  "height": 20,
  "series": [
    {
      "name": "Signal",
      "values": [1, 2, 3, 4, 3, 2, 1],
      "points": [[0, 1], [1, 2]]
    }
  ],
  "xAxis": { "name": "X", "labels": ["a", "b", "c"] },
  "yAxis": { "name": "Y" }
}

kind accepts: line, column, row, step, scatter, stackedcolumn, stackedrow, stackedarea, candlestick, box, pie, polar.

values is used by line / column / row / step / stacked / pie / polar series; points is used by scatter ([x, y]), candlestick ([open, high, close, low]), and box ([max, q3, q1, median, min]).

--live for interactive viewing

Pass --live to run an interactive chart loop in a real terminal — mouse hover shows tooltips, click-and-drag pans, mouse wheel zooms, and q / r / + / - keys quit / reset / zoom. Auto-detects Sixel if the terminal supports it (falls back to Braille otherwise). Ctrl+C also exits.

lvc --json '{"kind":"line","series":[{"values":[1,2,3,4,3,2,1]}]}' --live

--live is incompatible with --no-color (the loop relies on ANSI escapes to redraw frames in place) and requires a TTY (won't run with stdout redirected).

To pop a chart into a fresh terminal window from a script or agent, shell out through your platform's terminal-launcher:

• Windows Terminal: start wt.exe -- lvc --live --json '...'
• macOS Terminal: osascript -e 'tell app "Terminal" to do script "lvc --live --json ..."'
• GNOME Terminal: gnome-terminal -- lvc --live --json '...'

Pie sizing

Pie charts render each series name as a label outside its wedge and hide the legend, so wedges read as distinct even in --no-color. Outer labels need margin space around the disc — pies need at minimum --width 80 --height 30 (or terminal equivalent). Smaller canvases will collide the labels with the disc and squeeze it to a sliver.

License

MIT. See the LiveCharts2 repo.