Aw, this is great but node.js is putting me off it :/ I was hoping I wouldn't have to install something so heavy for such a small utility...

so try https://github.com/yaronn/wopr

That's interesting, but not very well-suited to real-time dashboards, is it? Seems to be for one-offs.

curling the markup is not for realtime. sometimes you can get away with curling in a loop with some sleep, and depending on the latency / scale you will get the same effect. however blessed-contrib can also be used as a server side component where clients curl for its endpoint (which is different than curling a static markup). that way it can return a live stream of data. you would use the same approach as https://github.com/yaronn/wopr/blob/master/server/server.js#... where your present method implementation will run in some loop / timeout and keep sending data (by calling screen.render).

Wow, that world map looks really good. Good suggestion, thanks.

Looks rather nice, reminiscent of drawing using Teletext (e.g. http://teletextart.co.uk/, http://www.bbcbasic.co.uk/bbcwin/manual/bbcwinh.html).

You don't even need to do that, just using a box-drawing character where half the character is black (U+2580 or U+2584) would double your vertical resolution.

Hiptext supports this: https://github.com/jart/hiptext/blob/d50329e3b975ffac0209c0a... But it's crashing when I run in Alpine :/

well, if you keep adding characters it won't be worth the effort, just sending pixels (or pixel groups) would be cheaper.

I think the idea was to use a wider range of characters, not a larger quantity of characters.