Hi all. I realize this is a bit of a long shot, but I’ve got a tree-hierarchy (like a list of git commits) that I’m trying to visualize as text. If anyone knows of a Racket package that would help with visualizing a tree as ascii, I would appreciate a pointer

I’m also broadly interested in any Racket packages which make it friendlier to build CLIs. So if you’ve got em, definitely let me know :slightly_smiling_face:. I’ve seen charterm. That looks quite nice as a base for building low-level terminal interaction. But it looks like it doesn’t provide many higher level abstractions.

Also low level is the ncurses package (https://github.com/dys-bigwig/racket-ncurses). I had a problem with charterm not handling unicode and poor interactions with Racket threads.

This might sound silly, but if you’re using linux you could always model the tree as a directory in /tmp, draw it using the tree command, and then pipe the output to wherever you’d like. Probably not what you had in mind, but I figured it was worth mentioning just in case.

For something a bit more featureful, ncurses has a newwin function that allows you to give x/y/height/width, along with arbitrary border characters used to draw the edges of the window. If you can transform your tree into non-overlapping coordinates somehow, you can just pass the x/y/height/width of all the nodes to newwin and curses would take care of the actual drawing automatically.

If you do end up using ncurses, feel free let me know if anything feels off or doesn’t work as expected. I haven’t updated the Racket port in quite some time.

ah nice, okay, thanks!

Does anybody know if it’s still possible to build a Chez from racket/ChezScheme? It’s most likely possible, but since the boot files are missing I guess the instructions now might be different.