Using gnuplot terminal on OSX

Question

I just installed gnuplot and I am trying to set the default terminal view. On the wikipedia page for gnuplot, there is an image with a graph:

Which terminal view is shown in the image at the link?

Answer 1

Your image looks more like qt than X11, so you could reinstall gnu plot to call the qt graphics library:

brew reinstall gnuplot --with-qt5

That's much simpler than getting XQuartz and X11 running since homebrew installs everything you need.

If you wanted to go X11 for reasons, then here is a nice tutorial and links to the visualization tools that should work on recent OS X versions.

• https://github.com/rdp/ruby_gnuplot

It uses X11 for the visualization and should help you get your graph on.

1. http://xquartz.macosforge.org/landing/ Install the package that gets downloaded, then
2. brew rm gnuplot && brew install gnuplot --with-x11

Then start XQuartz, make a new xterm and run a script like this in the xterm window running gnuplot:

set terminal x11
set title "Some Math Functions"
set xrange [-10:10]
set yrange [-2:2]
set zeroaxis
plot (x/4)**2, sin(x), 1/x

Skip the "set terminal" line if you are using qt as it gets set for you when gnuplot starts. If you need monochrome, you can also set terminal xterm.