[bitcoin-dev] [announce] LNvis alpha - A Lightning Network Visualizer

[William Casarin]

Hello lightning/bitcoin devs,

I've been working on an OpenGL Lighting Network visualizer written in C
+ nanovg with no dependencies except for glfw. I thought I would release
the alpha here first for testing.

Right now it only parses c-lightning channels and node json, but I'm
currently adding support for LND. I've only tested on linux, so it would
be great if we could get this working on macos/windows as well.

Picture: https://jb55.com/s/abe49a248360d41c.png
Code: https://github.com/jb55/lnvis


How it works
------------

LNvis renders the Lightning Network channel gossip, which include nodes
and the edges (channels) between those nodes.

- Channels are colored by the node that opened the channel
- Channel widths are rendered proportional to the capacity
- Right clicking a node filters the view to that node and its neighbors
- Dragging a node in any view will focus that node and its neihbors

That's about it for now. Next things that I think would be fun to have:

- Filter by alias/id in the UI
- "Google Maps" mode for highlighting potential routes between nodes
- Realtime channel updates from network gossip

Any other ideas and suggesstions would be great.

Contributors welcome!

Cheers,
Will