Gaston is a Julia package for plotting. It provides an interface to gnuplot, a powerful plotting package available on all major platforms.

Current stable release is v1.1.0, and it has been tested with Julia LTS (1.6) and stable (1.8), on Linux. Gaston should work on any platform that runs gnuplot.

CI Status:

Gaston.jl's documentation can be found here.

Why use Gaston, when there are powerful alternatives such as Plots.jl and Makie.jl? These are some Gaston features that may be attractive to you:

• Gaston can plot:
  • Using graphical windows, and keeping multiple plots active at a time, with mouse interaction
  • Directly to the REPL, using text (ASCII) or sixels
  • In Jupyter, Juno and other IDEs
• Supports popular 2-D plots: regular function plots, stem, step, histograms, images, etc.
• Supports surface, contour and heatmap 3-D plots.
• Can save plots to multiple formats, including pdf, png and svg.
• Provides a simple interface for knowledgeable users to access gnuplot features.
• Fast: time to load package, plot, and save to pdf is around six seconds.

Knowledge of gnuplot is not required. Users familiar with gnuplot, however, will be able to take advantage of Gaston's facilities to access gnuplot's vast feature set.

Gaston requires gnuplot to be installed in your system. It has been tested with versions 5.4 and above, but it should work with any 5.x version. Gaston also requires Julia v1.6.0 or above.

To install Gaston using Julia's packaging system, enter Julia's package manager prompt with ], and run

(v1.4) pkg> add Gaston

Gaston includes many tests, wich you can run to make sure your installation is working properly. To run the tests, enter Julia's package manager with ] and run

(v1.6) pkg> test Gaston

All tests should pass, although some tests may be labeled as "broken".