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CLI Tools

dapple ships 11 CLI tools as extras. Install individually or all at once:

pip install dapple[all-tools]

Shared Flags

All tools that produce graphical output share these flags:

Flag Meaning
-r / --renderer braille, quadrants, sextants, ascii, sixel, kitty, fingerprint, or auto
-w / --width Output width in terminal columns
-H / --height Output height in terminal rows
--dither Floyd-Steinberg dithering
--contrast Auto-contrast stretching
--invert Invert brightness
--grayscale Force grayscale
--no-color Disable color output
-o / --output Write to file instead of stdout

NO_COLOR Environment Variable

All tools honour the NO_COLOR convention. When the NO_COLOR environment variable is set (even to an empty string), colour output is suppressed automatically — equivalent to passing --no-color.

NO_COLOR=1 imgcat photo.jpg      # colorless output
NO_COLOR= funcat "sin(x)"        # empty string also works

Viewers

  • imgcat — Display images (JPEG, PNG, WebP, etc.) with grid/contact sheet mode
  • vidcat — Video frames, in-place playback, asciinema export
  • pdfcat — PDF page rendering
  • mdcat — Markdown with Rich formatting and inline images
  • htmlcat — HTML viewer with Rich formatting and inline images
  • ansicat — ANSI art viewer

Data & Math

  • funcat — Math expressions and parametric curves, with pipeline chaining
  • datcat — Structured data (JSON/JSONL/CSV/TSV) tables, sparklines, and charts
  • vizlib — Programmatic chart primitives (used by datcat)

Composition

  • compcat — Compare renderers side by side

Analysis

  • plotcat — Faceted data plots grouped by column
  • dashcat — YAML-driven terminal dashboards