Plotting in Emacs Lisp

Work In Progress and Proof Of Concept

I like Racket drawing packages, such as pict, plot and 2htdp/image, they are easy and fun to use, you can manipulate images like ordinary values, for example, the following creates two images then append them vertically:

;; Racekt
(vc-append (circle 100) (text "Moon"))

It would be nice if we can have this kind of pacakges for Emacs. This repo uses PLplot via Emacs dynamic module, it lets you plot in Emacs Lisp, for example, this plot y = sin(x), x within [-pi, pi]:

;; Emacs Lisp
(insert-image-file (plplot #'sin (- pi) pi))

Setup

You're going to need PLplot to build the dynamic module, you should be able to install it with your OS package manager, for example, macOS/Homebrew users can use:

$ brew install plplot

Build the dynamic module:

$ make
cc -Wall -shared -fpic -lplplot plplot-module.c -o plplot-module.so

Setup load-path and load the package:

(add-to-list 'load-path "~/src/plplot.el")
(require 'plplot)

Use-package users can achieve the above with:

(use-package plplot
  :load-path "~/src/plplot.el")

API

(plplot func x-min x-max xlabel ylabel title samples outfile)

Plot y=FUNC(x) from X-MIN to X-MAX.

(plplot-bar-chart ys xlabel ylabel title samples outfile)

Plot ys in bar chart.

Requires

• Emacs 25