mcp-ascii-charts

A Model Context Protocol server for generating ASCII charts directly in your terminal.

🎯 Features

• Pure ASCII charts - Lightweight visualizations for terminal environments
• MCP integration - Compatible with Claude, Cursor, and other MCP clients
• No GUI dependencies - Perfect for servers and SSH environments
• Highly customizable - Configurable dimensions, colors, and styles

📊 Supported chart types

• Line Chart - Line graphs for temporal trends
• Bar Chart - Horizontal and vertical bar charts
• Scatter Plot - Scatter plots for data correlation
• Histogram - Distribution histograms
• Sparkline - Inline mini-charts

🚀 Quick installation

Available on npm

Step 1: Install globally

# Install globally from npm (required for MCP servers)
npm install -g mcp-ascii-charts

# Or install from GitHub
npm install -g git+https://github.com/gianlucamazza/mcp-ascii-charts.git

Step 2: Configure your MCP client

Add to your Claude Desktop configuration file:

macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json
Windows: %APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json
Linux: ~/.config/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "ascii-charts": {
      "command": "mcp-ascii-charts"
    }
  }
}

Step 3: Restart Claude Desktop

After configuration, restart Claude Desktop to load the MCP server.

💡 Usage examples

Line chart

Monthly Sales (2024)
     100 ┤                                        ╭╮    
      90 ┤                                      ╭─╯╰╮   
      80 ┤                                    ╭─╯   ╰╮  
      70 ┤                                  ╭─╯      │  
      60 ┤                               ╭──╯        ╰╮ 
      50 ┤                            ╭──╯            │ 
      40 ┤                         ╭──╯               ╰─
      30 ┤                      ╭──╯                   
      20 ┤                   ╭──╯                      
      10 ┤                ╭──╯                         
       0 ┼────────────────╯                            
         Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec

Bar chart

Team Performance
Frontend  ████████████████████████████ 85%
Backend   ██████████████████████ 67%
DevOps    ████████████████ 54%
QA        ██████████████████████████████████ 92%

🛠️ MCP tools

| Function | Description | |----------|-------------| | create_line_chart | Generate line charts for temporal data | | create_bar_chart | Create horizontal/vertical bar charts | | create_scatter_plot | Visualize correlations between variables | | create_histogram | Show frequency distributions | | create_sparkline | Mini-charts for compact dashboards |

📋 Parameters

{
  "data": [10, 25, 30, 45, 60],
  "labels": ["Q1", "Q2", "Q3", "Q4", "Q5"],
  "title": "Quarterly Growth",
  "width": 60,
  "height": 15,
  "color": "blue"
}

🎨 Customization

• Dimensions: Configure width and height
• Colors: ANSI color support (12 colors available)
• Flexible data input: Arrays with optional labels
• Unicode rendering: Box-drawing characters for smooth visuals

🛠️ Development

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/gianlucamazza/mcp-ascii-charts.git
cd mcp-ascii-charts

# Install dependencies
npm install

# Run in development mode
npm run dev

# Run tests
npm test

# Build for production
npm run build

📚 Documentation

• Contributing Guidelines
• Changelog
• API Reference

🐛 Issues & Support

• Report Issues
• Feature Requests
• Bug Reports

📄 License

MIT License - see LICENSE file for details.

🙏 Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please read our Contributing Guidelines for details on how to submit pull requests, report issues, and contribute to the project.

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