Cosmo: The Graph Visualization Tool Built for Your Terminal

Visualize and explore complex data structures — right from your terminal. Cosmo is a fast, interactive graph visualizer that makes graphs and trees easy to understand, beautifully arranged, and fully explorable without ever leaving your command line.

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Why Build Cosmo?

When working with complex data structures — trees, dependency maps, object graphs — it’s too easy to get lost. Most visualizers need a GUI, a canvas, or complex positioning logic. But what if all that could just appear in your terminal?

That’s what Cosmo does. You feed it nodes and edges — and it automatically computes a clear, readable layout.

No coordinates. No configuration. Just render and explore.

Pan or search across your data. Every interaction is optimized for terminal fluidity — it feels like a minimal, responsive GUI built on ASCII art.

Render Graphs Programmatically

Cosmo works seamlessly as part of your workflow. Pass your data structures directly from code and see them come to life:

import { cosmo } from "cosmo-flow";

const nodes = [
  { id: "1", value: "Root" },
  { id: "2", value: "Child" },
  { id: "3", value: "Leaf" },
];
const edges = [
  { id: "1-2", source: "1", target: "2" },
  { id: "2-3", source: "2", target: "3" },
];

cosmo({ nodes, edges });

No need to predefine coordinates or specify layout rules — Cosmo handles positioning automatically, ensuring a clean, balanced visual every time.

Graphs from Files

Cosmo can also visualize graphs from JSON or YAML files with zero setup. Just run:

$ cosmo --file path/to/graph.json

Alternatively, Cosmo has a built-in file explorer lets you browse and search your filesystem for graph files — so you can open and switch files without leaving the terminal.

Explore, Search, Navigate

Once running, navigation is effortless:

• Pan: Use arrow keys or h, j, k, l for navigation. Hold Shift while using these keys to pan faster.
• Search: Press / to find nodes by ID or value
• Menu: Access themes, keybindings, and commands with Space or Escape

With built-in color themes like aura, dracula, atom, and catppuccin, you can adapt the visualization to your preferred terminal look.

Behind the Scenes

Cosmo uses a modern rendering layer built on react-curse, enabling smooth interactivity in a purely terminal environment. This makes it fast enough to handle large data sets while maintaining clarity and aesthetics.

Upcoming features include:

• Better edge paths
• In-place editing and edge rewiring.
• Live reload support.
• Layout customization.
• Export to SVG/PNG.

Why You’ll Love It

If you’ve ever wanted to see your data structures instead of imagining them, Cosmo gives you that instant clarity — directly in your terminal session. It’s simple, elegant, and fits naturally into any developer workflow.

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Explore the full project on GitHub:https://github.com/turutupa/cosmo