Gnuplot is the best plotting interface I’ve ever used. Once you’ve learned “the Gnuplot language”, it’s very fast and efficient to visualize anything and iterate on it interactively, and I personally find it more usable than GGPlot, Matplotlib, Seaborn, Bokeh, and Matlab.
I think Gnuplot is undervalued because by default the results look horrible. Like many power tools, it requires some config in ~/.gnuplotrc to modernize the looks; http://gnuplotting.org/ is a great source to get started.
Unfortunately, I’m mostly using Matplotlib these days because the data generation is in Python. But despite using it on and off for over a decade, I’m nowhere near my efficiency in Gnuplot, and often have to ask Google or Copilot for help if I’m doing something more complex.
Gnuplot is fantastic. And with the epslatex terminal, it sets the graphics in EPS and the text elements in TeXsobtgat you can get everything typeset juuuuuust right.
In Gnuplot you can indeed write each command in a very terse way; some simple examples:
plot cos(x) ls 2, sin(x) ls 3
plot 'file.dat' u 1:2 w lp lw 3 ps 2
But you can also write the same code in a descriptive way:
plot cos(x) linestyle 2, sin(x) linestyle 3
plot 'file.dat' using 1:2 with linespoints linewidth 3 pointsize 2
I think most people prefer the terse version once they learn it. But I’d definitely recommend learning the descriptive commands first, as the abbreviations follow very naturally from there.
I think Gnuplot is undervalued because by default the results look horrible. Like many power tools, it requires some config in ~/.gnuplotrc to modernize the looks; http://gnuplotting.org/ is a great source to get started.
Unfortunately, I’m mostly using Matplotlib these days because the data generation is in Python. But despite using it on and off for over a decade, I’m nowhere near my efficiency in Gnuplot, and often have to ask Google or Copilot for help if I’m doing something more complex.