6 ms·

New Features in Gnuplot 5.4

154 points by leephillips 6y ago

ddavis 6y ago
Gnuplot is really an awesome project. Though I don't use it all that much anymore, it will always hold a special place in my computing heart. In an undergrad physics lab it was my first experience with launching a program from a shell-- and that sure sent me in the right direction. Thanks to all who have contributed to the project.
michaelrpeskin 6y ago
Love to see it still alive! Did my whole Physics PhD in high performance C and FORTRAN with gnuplot for visuals and Perl to tie it all together.
- olodus 6y ago
  When I did my master thesis we had to use servers we were not allowed to install most things on. But awk and gnuplot was there. All we needed for some great results. Thought of it as a hack in the beginning but in the end it became our whole pipeline.
jgehrcke 6y ago
For us, gnuplot and xmgrace were two of the most important command line tools during physics education, esp. in computational physics. Often piping freshly simulated data right into one of both for quick visualization.
- kergonath 6y ago
  I still use gnuplot for publication-quality graphs, when I can’t be arsed to use R. It’s also still very useful to generate on-the-fly plots to help sifting through large numbers of datasets. The last steps of my simulations is usually to generate a graph showing critical parameters to make sure it makes sense at a glance. Much easier than eyeballing number tables. Gnuplot is perfect for this: it is very fast and lightweight.
ggm 6y ago
The example spider plot is covid19 data. In 30 years time somebody will look at gnuplot 10 and say "oh yea I remember that.."
- coldtea 6y ago
  "... it was back when the population was 8 billion and lived in cities as opposed to 1 billion scattered underground"
haolez 6y ago
Gnuplot was my first experience dealing with an open source project when I was starting my career. I went to their IRC channel and asked something related to the GNU project. I was immediately scolded: "Gnuplot is not a GNU project!!" :D
- middleclick 6y ago
  During my teenage years when I first started C++ (thank you Accelerated C++), I went to the ##c++ channel on Freenode and was immediately flamed for my "weird" nick, to the point that the people didn't bother to answer my question but instead went after me personally, just because I had picked a nick based on leet speak. I won't deny that it left a very bad impression on me about the open source community, especially as someone who was new to it.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- rnhmjoj 6y ago
  I have only recently learned this and I too was surprised it's not a GNU project, and even more so it's not GPL-compatible. The license it's essentially a BSD with the (absurd) restriction that you can't distribute the "complete modified source code", whatever that means, but only patches. I wonder what's the motivation.
  - maxerickson 6y ago
    It was first released in 1986. Distribution of software was different then.
RodgerTheGreat 6y ago
can you change a plot's background color without jumping through polygon-drawing hoops yet?
- leephillips 6y ago
  set term x11 background rgb "aquamarine" (for example).
billfruit 6y ago
From using gnuplot of a few versions ago for tasks involving rather many plot generation, I felt that the gnuplot syntax and commands are rather unintutive and hard to remember, perhaps in some way aesthetically jarring. Also the interactive plots it generated was rather barebones. Plotting from a pandas dataframe seems more convenient way than using gnuplot presently.
- smabie 6y ago
  Yeah, I agree. Though actually I like plotting from Julia the best. You see software like gnuplot a lot: started its life just doing one thing and then slowly growing. The end result is an unholy mess of a system. All things eventually end of being Turing complete, so let's just eliminate the middle man and use a programming language. Other examples of this are html/js, excel, vim, and bc. A much better result can be achieved if you first design then language (or use an existing one) and just implement libraries to do what you want. A good example of this is Emacs. Greenspun's tenth rule: Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp. Incidentally, I haven't encountered much gnuplot use nowadays. Maybe 10 years ago it was pretty popular in academia, but most have moved onto using Python and matplotlib for plotting, even if the models are written in something else. Matplotlib is truly terrible, but at least it comes with a sort of acceptable programming language.
  - marmaduke 6y ago
    > haven't encountered much gnuplot use nowadays when I run top on a login server on HPC systems, there's always a few gnuplots doing something. > Matplotlib is truly terrible If Matplotlib is now considered terrible, then at least it has advanced the standard expectation. When I started plotting stuff, choosing among plplot, plotutil, latex, gnuplot etc, Matplotlib was and remains a great choice. And it does what you prescribe: > first design then language (or use an existing one) and just implement libraries to do what you want
  - cosmic_quanta 6y ago
    Tangentially related: I've been working on a plotting tool (https://github.com/LaurentRDC/pandoc-plot https://github.com/LaurentRDC/pandoc-plot) that supports many plotting toolkits. I recently added support for Plots.jl. I can't believe how SLOW it is to get from running a script to getting output. 10x slower than matplotlib, 100x slower than Gnuplot.
hendry 6y ago
Here's a video of how to use Gnuplot within a Jupyter Notebook: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhmctDeRAl4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhmctDeRAl4 Advantage is that it's a slightly better environment to iterate in.
samch93 6y ago
Amazing project, but seriously why do people spend their time and energy to implement 3d bar charts?
- leephillips 6y ago
  I don’t know the story in this case, but, usually, when the gnuplot devs implement a feature like this, it’s because people are asking for it.
gen220 6y ago
Before I got accustomed to gnuplot, I was most familiar with d3. I spent a lot of time prototyping different viz strategies for myself in d3. All I can say is, I was blind and now I see. If you get a rush from piping massive csv files into sed/awk/grep/tr/cut, then into wc/sqlite3/[etc], and are at all interested in plotting visuals of the results for yourself, please do yourself a favor and spend 30 minutes riding the learning curve of this wonderful program. IME, the docs are wonderful and kind to beginners who aren't afraid to cmd+f for the bits they're interested in. After a couple hours of fiddling, you'll find getting a first stab at a graph faster in gnuplot than in excel. Then, you'll wonder about all that time you could have been saving your whole life. Like any other cli tool, its language takes a bit of grokking, but you can institutionalize your knowledge in scripts and carry them with you the rest of your life. Seriously, try it out.
- The_rationalist 6y ago
  What are the concrete advantages of gnuplot versus D3?
  - gen220 6y ago
    It depends on your use case. An obvious one is that gnuplot doesn’t require a web browser and a JavaScript VM, but I acknowledge this is irrelevant to some people. gnuplot integrates seamlessly with a shell, so you can do all of your data transformation in awk/sed, and pipe the results into gnuplot. For d3, you’d need to load the data file, plot it, and then face the temptation of tweaking in JS vs tweaking the source data. The first iteration of “I have a csv file” to “I have an interpretable graph” is very quick with gnuplot, which helps with prototyping and identifying systematic features of the data. You can squeeze d3 to get this, but you’d need to whip out a lot of boilerplate to get there. There are a bunch of frameworks built on d3 that promise this sort of experience, but if you want to end up with fine-grained control of the viz, you’ll need to drop down into d3 eventually. You don’t have to know anything about HTML, the DOM or CSS to make a decent graph in gnuplot. Of course, if you’re skilled at these, you can make very nice interactive graphs in d3. Tangentially, I had a viz professor who would give any one who used interactivity to encode a dimension of information an immediate bias of -20%, because interactivity is more often a limiting element rather than a feature. :) That being said if I wanted to build something productively interactive, I’d still reach for d3 over gnuplot. Curious to hear others thoughts on your question, too!
W0lf 6y ago
For a quick and dirty on the spot visualization for some data on the command line, I'd like to plug the following: function plot() { { echo 'plot "-"' "$@"; cat; } | gnuplot -persist; } For example: seq 100 | sed 's/.*/s(&)/' | bc -l | plot linecolor 2
- p4l4g4 6y ago
  Nice! I like it when you can plug such programs in a pipeline. Recently found out that you can use png:- as source or destination in any imagemagick command, to pipe images around! I find it really useful in combination with xclip, with -t to set the mime type. You can paste the result almost anywhere!
langitbiru 6y ago
You know what? I couldn't help myself thinking: So this is the kind of the article that can get you paid $300 (give or take). LWN pays $300 for a well-written article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23920240 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23920240
gjulianm 6y ago
My biggest grip with Gnuplot was that the default style is pretty terrible. For everyone looking to make graphs, two pieces of advice: - Use pngcairo, or pdfcairo or something like that. Nobody likes graphs without anti-aliasing. - Use a nice color palette, from https://github.com/Gnuplotting/gnuplot-palettes https://github.com/Gnuplotting/gnuplot-palettes , such as dark2 or viridis.
- leephillips 6y ago
  Good advice. Even better to use one of the vector outputs, such as SVG, when you can.
xvilka 6y ago
Problem of Gnuplot is their weird license that hinders it's adoption as a library.
nullc 6y ago
I really wish Fedora would stop stripping GNU Readline out of gnuplot, this really lobotomizes its usability.
- gwd 6y ago
  It sounds like gnuplot's license isn't GPL-compatible, so Fedora would be violating the law to ship gnuplot with readline. What you really mean is, "I wish gnuplot would change their license to be GPL-compatible so they could legally use readline."
  - nullc 6y ago
    Maybe, there is a disagreement about the license interpretation. For decades only debian adopted this view, and only in fairly recently (last two years?) did fedora drop readline support. The alternative it uses is broken almost to the point of unsuitability (e.g. write any line long enough to wrap and try editing it)
mangecoeur 6y ago
> GNUplot is language independent Not really since it's dependent on its own scripting language. That's like saying Matplotlib is language independent, you just need to know its scripting language (Python).
- leephillips 6y ago
  When people say gnuplot (not GNUplot) is language independent, they mean it is not tied to the language in which you are creating the data that you are plotting (unlike a plotting library, such as Matplotlib). This means that when you move your simulation from Python to Fortran or Julia or C, you can use all of your gnuplot scripts unchanged. You don’t have to learn about a new plotting package or library. And that’s because it has its own scripting language.
  - whyever 6y ago
    I still don't see how this is different from matplotlib. You can also move your simulation to a different language and keep using matplotlib for plotting, with it's own scripting language Python.
    - leephillips 6y ago
      I’ve used both Matplotlib and gnuplot extensively for visualizing the results of simulations and other tasks. I’ll try to briefly explain why I say that the gnuplot solution is portable while the Matplotlib solution is not. You don’t get plots from Matplotlib just by using Python, nor even Python + numpy. You also have to learn the conventions of the Matplotlib library, including the horrendous mechanism for making and storing settings. This amounts to learning Matplotlib’s domain specific language, which is at least as onerous as learning gnuplot’s scripting language. When you move your simulation project from Python to another language (and this is a common sequence, as people often prototype a calculation in Python but then want to make it bigger) you will be able to keep using your Matplotlib routines if your method was to store the simulation output in a file and, in a decoupled step, read and plot the file with a Python/Matplotlib program. This is a trivial form of portability that goes without saying. But you will have to maintain a Python + numpy + Matplotlib + [maybe more] ecosystem, with the Python world’s notoriously shifting set of dependencies. In contrast, gnuplot is a compiled, standalone program. There is no ecosystem to maintain. If your plotting phase was not decoupled from the calculation, and you have plotting code in your simulation code to plot things on the fly, you have to start over. Obviously you can’t use this plotting code in your Fortran program. In contrast, gnuplot has universal interfaces through sockets, FIFOs, and files. You won’t have to touch the plotting code, just trivially rewrite the lines of code that, for example, open and talk through a socket.

154 points by leephillips 6y ago

Gnuplot is really an awesome project. Though I don't use it all that much anymore, it will always hold a special place in my computing heart. In an undergrad physics lab it was my first experience with launching a program from a shell-- and that sure sent me in the right direction. Thanks to all who have contributed to the project.

michaelrpeskin 6y ago

Love to see it still alive! Did my whole Physics PhD in high performance C and FORTRAN with gnuplot for visuals and Perl to tie it all together.

olodus 6y ago
When I did my master thesis we had to use servers we were not allowed to install most things on. But awk and gnuplot was there. All we needed for some great results. Thought of it as a hack in the beginning but in the end it became our whole pipeline.

jgehrcke 6y ago

For us, gnuplot and xmgrace were two of the most important command line tools during physics education, esp. in computational physics. Often piping freshly simulated data right into one of both for quick visualization.

kergonath 6y ago
I still use gnuplot for publication-quality graphs, when I can’t be arsed to use R. It’s also still very useful to generate on-the-fly plots to help sifting through large numbers of datasets. The last steps of my simulations is usually to generate a graph showing critical parameters to make sure it makes sense at a glance. Much easier than eyeballing number tables. Gnuplot is perfect for this: it is very fast and lightweight.

ggm 6y ago

The example spider plot is covid19 data. In 30 years time somebody will look at gnuplot 10 and say "oh yea I remember that.."

coldtea 6y ago
"... it was back when the population was 8 billion and lived in cities as opposed to 1 billion scattered underground"

haolez 6y ago

Gnuplot was my first experience dealing with an open source project when I was starting my career. I went to their IRC channel and asked something related to the GNU project. I was immediately scolded: "Gnuplot is not a GNU project!!" :D

middleclick 6y ago
During my teenage years when I first started C++ (thank you Accelerated C++), I went to the ##c++ channel on Freenode and was immediately flamed for my "weird" nick, to the point that the people didn't bother to answer my question but instead went after me personally, just because I had picked a nick based on leet speak. I won't deny that it left a very bad impression on me about the open source community, especially as someone who was new to it.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
rnhmjoj 6y ago
I have only recently learned this and I too was surprised it's not a GNU project, and even more so it's not GPL-compatible. The license it's essentially a BSD with the (absurd) restriction that you can't distribute the "complete modified source code", whatever that means, but only patches. I wonder what's the motivation.
- maxerickson 6y ago
  It was first released in 1986. Distribution of software was different then.

RodgerTheGreat 6y ago

can you change a plot's background color without jumping through polygon-drawing hoops yet?

leephillips 6y ago
set term x11 background rgb "aquamarine" (for example).

billfruit 6y ago

From using gnuplot of a few versions ago for tasks involving rather many plot generation, I felt that the gnuplot syntax and commands are rather unintutive and hard to remember, perhaps in some way aesthetically jarring. Also the interactive plots it generated was rather barebones. Plotting from a pandas dataframe seems more convenient way than using gnuplot presently.

smabie 6y ago
Yeah, I agree. Though actually I like plotting from Julia the best. You see software like gnuplot a lot: started its life just doing one thing and then slowly growing. The end result is an unholy mess of a system. All things eventually end of being Turing complete, so let's just eliminate the middle man and use a programming language. Other examples of this are html/js, excel, vim, and bc. A much better result can be achieved if you first design then language (or use an existing one) and just implement libraries to do what you want. A good example of this is Emacs. Greenspun's tenth rule: Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp. Incidentally, I haven't encountered much gnuplot use nowadays. Maybe 10 years ago it was pretty popular in academia, but most have moved onto using Python and matplotlib for plotting, even if the models are written in something else. Matplotlib is truly terrible, but at least it comes with a sort of acceptable programming language.
- marmaduke 6y ago
  > haven't encountered much gnuplot use nowadays when I run top on a login server on HPC systems, there's always a few gnuplots doing something. > Matplotlib is truly terrible If Matplotlib is now considered terrible, then at least it has advanced the standard expectation. When I started plotting stuff, choosing among plplot, plotutil, latex, gnuplot etc, Matplotlib was and remains a great choice. And it does what you prescribe: > first design then language (or use an existing one) and just implement libraries to do what you want
- cosmic_quanta 6y ago
  Tangentially related: I've been working on a plotting tool (https://github.com/LaurentRDC/pandoc-plot https://github.com/LaurentRDC/pandoc-plot) that supports many plotting toolkits. I recently added support for Plots.jl. I can't believe how SLOW it is to get from running a script to getting output. 10x slower than matplotlib, 100x slower than Gnuplot.

hendry 6y ago

Here's a video of how to use Gnuplot within a Jupyter Notebook: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhmctDeRAl4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhmctDeRAl4 Advantage is that it's a slightly better environment to iterate in.

samch93 6y ago

Amazing project, but seriously why do people spend their time and energy to implement 3d bar charts?

leephillips 6y ago
I don’t know the story in this case, but, usually, when the gnuplot devs implement a feature like this, it’s because people are asking for it.

gen220 6y ago

Before I got accustomed to gnuplot, I was most familiar with d3. I spent a lot of time prototyping different viz strategies for myself in d3. All I can say is, I was blind and now I see. If you get a rush from piping massive csv files into sed/awk/grep/tr/cut, then into wc/sqlite3/[etc], and are at all interested in plotting visuals of the results for yourself, please do yourself a favor and spend 30 minutes riding the learning curve of this wonderful program. IME, the docs are wonderful and kind to beginners who aren't afraid to cmd+f for the bits they're interested in. After a couple hours of fiddling, you'll find getting a first stab at a graph faster in gnuplot than in excel. Then, you'll wonder about all that time you could have been saving your whole life. Like any other cli tool, its language takes a bit of grokking, but you can institutionalize your knowledge in scripts and carry them with you the rest of your life. Seriously, try it out.

The_rationalist 6y ago
What are the concrete advantages of gnuplot versus D3?
- gen220 6y ago
  It depends on your use case. An obvious one is that gnuplot doesn’t require a web browser and a JavaScript VM, but I acknowledge this is irrelevant to some people. gnuplot integrates seamlessly with a shell, so you can do all of your data transformation in awk/sed, and pipe the results into gnuplot. For d3, you’d need to load the data file, plot it, and then face the temptation of tweaking in JS vs tweaking the source data. The first iteration of “I have a csv file” to “I have an interpretable graph” is very quick with gnuplot, which helps with prototyping and identifying systematic features of the data. You can squeeze d3 to get this, but you’d need to whip out a lot of boilerplate to get there. There are a bunch of frameworks built on d3 that promise this sort of experience, but if you want to end up with fine-grained control of the viz, you’ll need to drop down into d3 eventually. You don’t have to know anything about HTML, the DOM or CSS to make a decent graph in gnuplot. Of course, if you’re skilled at these, you can make very nice interactive graphs in d3. Tangentially, I had a viz professor who would give any one who used interactivity to encode a dimension of information an immediate bias of -20%, because interactivity is more often a limiting element rather than a feature. :) That being said if I wanted to build something productively interactive, I’d still reach for d3 over gnuplot. Curious to hear others thoughts on your question, too!

W0lf 6y ago

For a quick and dirty on the spot visualization for some data on the command line, I'd like to plug the following: function plot() { { echo 'plot "-"' "$@"; cat; } | gnuplot -persist; } For example: seq 100 | sed 's/.*/s(&)/' | bc -l | plot linecolor 2

p4l4g4 6y ago
Nice! I like it when you can plug such programs in a pipeline. Recently found out that you can use png:- as source or destination in any imagemagick command, to pipe images around! I find it really useful in combination with xclip, with -t to set the mime type. You can paste the result almost anywhere!

langitbiru 6y ago

You know what? I couldn't help myself thinking: So this is the kind of the article that can get you paid $300 (give or take). LWN pays $300 for a well-written article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23920240 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23920240

gjulianm 6y ago

My biggest grip with Gnuplot was that the default style is pretty terrible. For everyone looking to make graphs, two pieces of advice: - Use pngcairo, or pdfcairo or something like that. Nobody likes graphs without anti-aliasing. - Use a nice color palette, from https://github.com/Gnuplotting/gnuplot-palettes https://github.com/Gnuplotting/gnuplot-palettes , such as dark2 or viridis.

leephillips 6y ago
Good advice. Even better to use one of the vector outputs, such as SVG, when you can.

xvilka 6y ago

Problem of Gnuplot is their weird license that hinders it's adoption as a library.

nullc 6y ago

I really wish Fedora would stop stripping GNU Readline out of gnuplot, this really lobotomizes its usability.

gwd 6y ago
It sounds like gnuplot's license isn't GPL-compatible, so Fedora would be violating the law to ship gnuplot with readline. What you really mean is, "I wish gnuplot would change their license to be GPL-compatible so they could legally use readline."
- nullc 6y ago
  Maybe, there is a disagreement about the license interpretation. For decades only debian adopted this view, and only in fairly recently (last two years?) did fedora drop readline support. The alternative it uses is broken almost to the point of unsuitability (e.g. write any line long enough to wrap and try editing it)

mangecoeur 6y ago

> GNUplot is language independent Not really since it's dependent on its own scripting language. That's like saying Matplotlib is language independent, you just need to know its scripting language (Python).

leephillips 6y ago
When people say gnuplot (not GNUplot) is language independent, they mean it is not tied to the language in which you are creating the data that you are plotting (unlike a plotting library, such as Matplotlib). This means that when you move your simulation from Python to Fortran or Julia or C, you can use all of your gnuplot scripts unchanged. You don’t have to learn about a new plotting package or library. And that’s because it has its own scripting language.
- whyever 6y ago
  I still don't see how this is different from matplotlib. You can also move your simulation to a different language and keep using matplotlib for plotting, with it's own scripting language Python.
  - leephillips 6y ago
    I’ve used both Matplotlib and gnuplot extensively for visualizing the results of simulations and other tasks. I’ll try to briefly explain why I say that the gnuplot solution is portable while the Matplotlib solution is not. You don’t get plots from Matplotlib just by using Python, nor even Python + numpy. You also have to learn the conventions of the Matplotlib library, including the horrendous mechanism for making and storing settings. This amounts to learning Matplotlib’s domain specific language, which is at least as onerous as learning gnuplot’s scripting language. When you move your simulation project from Python to another language (and this is a common sequence, as people often prototype a calculation in Python but then want to make it bigger) you will be able to keep using your Matplotlib routines if your method was to store the simulation output in a file and, in a decoupled step, read and plot the file with a Python/Matplotlib program. This is a trivial form of portability that goes without saying. But you will have to maintain a Python + numpy + Matplotlib + [maybe more] ecosystem, with the Python world’s notoriously shifting set of dependencies. In contrast, gnuplot is a compiled, standalone program. There is no ecosystem to maintain. If your plotting phase was not decoupled from the calculation, and you have plotting code in your simulation code to plot things on the fly, you have to start over. Obviously you can’t use this plotting code in your Fortran program. In contrast, gnuplot has universal interfaces through sockets, FIFOs, and files. You won’t have to touch the plotting code, just trivially rewrite the lines of code that, for example, open and talk through a socket.