[vox-tech] tell gnuplot to use a single X11 window

[Peter Jay Salzman]

On Mon 23 May 05,  2:55 PM, Dylan Beaudette <dylan at iici.no-ip.org> said:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> is there any good way to get gnuplot to send its output to a single window, 
> such that any successive plots update an existing X11 window?
> 
> i have looked over the gnuplot man page, and can't seem to find what i am 
> looking for.
> 
> while it is a little ridiculous, i like to keep track of my progress while 
> writting with this little script:
> 
> while `true`; do wc -w main.tex | awk '{print $1}' >> word_count ;\
> echo "set ylab 'words'; set xlab 'minutes'; \
> plot 'word_count' with lines notitle" | gnuplot -persist;\
> sleep 60; done
> 
> this produces a nice little graph updated once a minute. however, gnuplot on 
> linux produces a new window with every plot. on OSX it is possible to keep 
> all output in a single window* .
> 
> * there is a bit of a difference on OSX, as an application called AquaTerm is 
> being used to render the output, not X11.
> 
> any ideas on how to do this with regular X11?
> 
> thanks!
 
I had the same problem.  My fix was to write a small perl script to wrap
around gnuplot.

The script writes a small gnuplot script and then invokes gnuplot with the
script.

When it comes time for a new plot, the script rewrites the gnuplot script,
kills all instances of gnuplot, and re-runs gnuplot with the new gnuplot
script.

It works surprisingly well.

Pete

PS- The data is output of a time evolution partial differential equation.
It creates a "movie" of the time evolution of a quantum wavefunction.  Very
cool.

-- 
Every theory is killed sooner or later, but if the theory has good in it,
that good is embodied and continued in the next theory. -- Albert Einstein

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