// the find
holman/spark
▁▂▃▅▂▇ in your shell.
spark is a single shell script that renders sparkline bar charts directly in your terminal using Unicode block characters. You pipe numbers to it and get an ASCII histogram back. It's a tiny utility — 100-odd lines of shell — that slots neatly into shell pipelines for quick data glancing.
The pipe-friendly design is exactly right: no config, no flags you need to remember, just numbers in and glyphs out. The test suite is present and the script is short enough that you can actually read and trust the whole thing. Homebrew availability means zero friction to install on macOS. The README examples are practical and show real use cases rather than toy data.
Unmaintained since 2022 and practically frozen since well before that — the last meaningful code change is years old. Font rendering inconsistency is a real problem: whether the blocks look uniform depends entirely on your terminal font, and that's fully out of the script's control. There's no support for negative numbers or labeled axes, so anything beyond 'which of these values is bigger' is off the table. This is a parlor trick, not a monitoring tool — don't reach for it when you need actual charting.