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If you are on the EGU next week by accident, I will also present it as a PICO presentation on Monday morning, April 9th at 8:30

I actually found psyplot via the EGU schedule and I'll be there (I'll also present a PICO on xarray related stuff, a bit later on Monday afternoon)!

I came across psyplot, which might be also relevant here. I haven't looked at it in-depth yet, but it seems it has already a comprehensive set of features and good documentation.

cc @Chilipp

A few months back, after discussing the idea with @czender, I started working on a simple reimplementation of NCO using xarray and dask (called xnco). My efforts on were mostly to compare the workflows (xarray vs. shell commands) and performance improvements possible when using dask-distributed. My efforts on that project have completely stalled and I'm not sure I will return to it. If anyone is interested though, I'd be happy to put that code up on github and let someone else run with it.

Note that a useful xarray-cli doesn't have to do visualization only. An xarray-based replacement for cdo (for example) could have some great advantages: - out-of-core computations - much more flexible (I was using cdo the other day to merge files together and was horrified to see that cdo requires the variables in the two files to have the same order)

I'm nut sure how many people will use a cli instead of good-old-python scripts though....

What I would like to see is a replacement for ncview. Despite being archaic in terms of its technology (e.g. it requires X11), it is still used daily by a huge number of scientists because it serves a very important need: quick visual examination of a netCDF dataset (also works on remote systems via X forwarding).

Imagine a modern implementation of ncview backed by xarray and holoviews/geoviews. $ xrview my_files.*.nc Found 3 data variables and 6 coordinates in dataset Serving HTTP on 0.0.0.0 port 8000 (http://0.0.0.0:8000/) ...

This would spawn a web server providing an interactive web-based GUI explorer for all variables in the dataset. You could use this locally or on a remote system.

I think such an app would catch on like wildfire. But I agree completely that it is out of scope of xarray and belongs as a standalone project.

This looks like a cool project, but a command line utility for netCDF files is outside the scope of xarray so I think it's best maintained separately. Of course, we are very happy to link to it (and other such tools) in the docs.