Installation

From source

youplot-rs requires Rust 1.85 or later. Clone the repository and install the uplot binary with cargo:

git clone https://github.com/nrminor/youplot-rs.git
cd youplot-rs
cargo install --path youplot-cli

This places the uplot binary in your cargo bin directory (typically ~/.cargo/bin), which should already be on your PATH if you installed Rust through rustup.

To build without installing system-wide, use cargo build --release from the workspace root. The binary will be at target/release/uplot.

From crates.io

Once the crates are published, installation will be a single command:

cargo install youplot-cli

This is not yet available during the initial development phase.

Verifying the installation

After installing, verify that uplot is available:

uplot --help

You should see the help text listing all available commands and global options.

Platform notes

youplot-rs works on Linux, macOS, and Windows. Terminal rendering quality depends on your terminal emulator’s Unicode support and font coverage.

For the best results, use a terminal emulator and font combination that supports Unicode braille patterns (U+2800 through U+28FF), block elements (U+2580 through U+259F), and box-drawing characters (U+2500 through U+257F). Most modern terminals and monospace fonts handle these well. If braille dots appear as empty boxes or question marks, your font does not include braille glyphs; switching to a font like Noto Sans Mono, DejaVu Sans Mono, or Iosevka will usually resolve this.

Color output is auto-detected based on whether the output stream is a terminal. When piping output through another program or redirecting to a file, colors are automatically suppressed. You can override this behavior with the -C flag to force colors on or the -M flag to force plain output.