I made a dead simple, somehow surprisingly useful one for python back in 2014. I still use it for quick investigations all the time.

hipsterplot: https://github.com/imh/hipsterplot

I also wrote a more generic Python terminal plotting library: https://github.com/dheera/python-termgraphics

For robotics people -- the above is used in rosshow: http://github.com/dheera/rosshow

I guess plotille (https://github.com/tammoippen/plotille) is the closest match for python. And maybe termgraph (https://github.com/mkaz/termgraph) is kind of similar.

It's not unicode, but there's also sixelplot [1] which allows matplotlib plotting in a terminal using sixel. The underlying pysixel library [2] unfortunately doesn't support Python 3.7+ however.

[1] https://github.com/kktk-KO/sixelplot

[2] https://github.com/saitoha/PySixel

There is a PR that fixes it for 3.7, it needs review: https://github.com/saitoha/PySixel/pull/5

Honest question: Why would I ever want/need to plot data in the R console, and not in a R graphics window?

the "work" you are doing is via ssh into a big box behind gateway/jumphost with peculiar limitations on ports & access from the data gravity well which is your bog standard asymmetric home isp ; annoying but you need to do anyway because the remote hardware has more bandwidth, memory, cores and storage than a stack of laptops taller than you... I could go on but lets just acknowledge not every task fits in a prepackaged shiny solution.