A little dataviz goes a long way.

Here's an example being used in a slack message.

Chartmoji are small embedded charts that can be used inline in certain tools like slack to communicate a series of values in a visual way.

These are essentially an emoji implementation of Edward Tufte's sparkline concept.

Assume you had a series of values and wanted to show the trend. Given the values [40, 93, 58, 17, 96], you could just include it inline instead. It's much easier to understand the values this way.

There's also a bar chart version: .

If you want to see them in action (and play with them) you can join this slack channel.

https://join.slack.com/t/chartmoji/shared_invite/enQtODg1NDg3MDgyMTk3LTM5ZjA2MTI3NWVmNzI1Y2M1MTRjMjcwYWEyNTUxZGRlZDMyNzBlOWQ3YzI0ZGIwNmFiNTBiNTUwMzc4ZDc2YTE

quickstart

Clone this repo, and the emoji can be found in images/line and images/bar. Upload them wherever you see fit to use them.

There's a lot of images though, so if you're adding them to slack, you probably want to see the uploader section below to help automate that.

how's it work?

These are pre-generated charts with 5 values plotted in a series, and values of 0,1,2. To see a chart, you simply request the correct emoji like so:

:chart_ABCDE:

If A=1,B=2,C=1,D=0,A=1, you'd have :chart_12101:.

Since you're adding all the charts as emoji, that image will be inlined when referenced in your chat client.

Uses

I don't expect anyone to actually type these in a conversation, but for your integrations they make things much more interesting while still allowing you to communicate numerical trends in a pleasing way.

usage

This repo comes with prebuilt images that can be used to displays simple charts.

If you don't want to rebuild them with custom colors, you can just upload the included images. See the next section to help you with that.

slack emoji uploader

If you don't want to add all 216 chartmoji manually, you can use an included tool.

There is an excellent tool available at https://github.com/sgreben/slack-emoji-upload.

For convenience there are builds for 64 bit versions of mac, windows and linux in the contrib/ folder.

Example usage to upload all the line chartmoji:

./contrib/macos-slack-emoji-uploader \
  -email [email protected] \
  -password $SECRET \
  -team your-team \
  out/line/*.png

The options are as folows:

./macos-slack-emoji-uploader -h

Usage of ./macos-slack-emoji-uploader:
  -email string
    	user email
  -notify-channel string
    	Notify this channel on successful uploads
  -password string
    	user password
  -quiet
    	suppress log output
  -team string
    	Slack team (only needed when using email/password auth)
  -token string
    	Slack API token

note you may see errors about slack rate limiting you during the upload. These are just warnings, the client attempts to upload that emoji again.

customizing the charts

The current chart colors were chosen because they work well with both light and dark themes in slack.

However, if you want to change the colors of the charts, edit bin/create.py. You're looking for the lines near the top like:

line_color = gray
bg_color = white
transparent_bg = True

Change those to one of the predefined colors in the script.

If you've got python3 installed and gnu make, you can run make build and the dependencies will be downloaded and images placed in out/line/ and out/bar/.

Then just upload the images to slack.

formatting your data

See the script in contrib/samples/mojify.py for some code snippets on normalizing your data into a series within 0,1,2 range.

example usage:

>>> import mojify
>>> values = [20,35,80,90,1]
>>> mojify.chartmoji(values)
':chart_ln01220:'
>>>