All, Several days ago I tested the waters and asked you guys, the community, how useful you thought a command-line front-end to matplotlib would be. The overwhelmingly positive feedback was enough for me to sit down and figure out how to do this well, and in a way that would mimic existing tools to achieve such tasks. One example being the `graph` utility, which is a part of GNU plotutils. Though there are subtle differences between mpl_binutils and GNU plotutils they, in my opinion, improve the user experience and reduce the ambiguity regarding the parsing of command-line options.
I am announcing that mpl_binutils is in a state ready to be tested by you guys. Hopefully you'll find it useful. You can check out the source code here: https://github.com/dmcdougall/mpl_binutils Without getting into details, I ran into some serious limitations with argparse. At the end of the day, nothing is perfect, but some tools are better than others. One such tool, docopt, was shown to me by Mark Lawrence. docopt will change the way I do any python from the command-line in the future. docopt is a light-weight command-line parsing library written in python with no dependencies. mpl_binutils has two dependencies: docopt and matplotlib. Most of you should already have one of these! For the other, a simple `pip install docopt` should work but I had no problems installing it from source (python setup.py install) on OS X. mpl_binutils is currently a single script (a python script), called mpl-graph. There is example usage on the github readme if you'd like to take a look. Currently, mpl-graph doesn't fail gracefully. It should, but I wanted to get something working first. Command-line option validation is next on my todo list and since there are only a handful of command line options implemented (albeit the most useful ones, in my opinion), this shouldn't be too big of a job. Go forth and fork! -- Damon McDougall http://www.damon-is-a-geek.com B2.39 Mathematics Institute University of Warwick Coventry West Midlands CV4 7AL United Kingdom ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Everyone hates slow websites. So do we. Make your web apps faster with AppDynamics Download AppDynamics Lite for free today: http://p.sf.net/sfu/appdyn_sfd2d_oct _______________________________________________ Matplotlib-devel mailing list Matplotlib-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/matplotlib-devel
