The commands supported by PyXPlot are only a subset of those available in gnuplot, although most of its functionality is present. Features which are supported by this version include:
Allocation of user-defined variables and functions.
The print, help, exit and quit commands.
The reset and clear commands.
The ! command, to execute the remainder of the line as a shell command, e.g. !ls.
The cd and pwd commands, to change and display the current working directory.
The use of ‘ ‘ back-quotes to substitute the output of a shell command.†It should be noted that back-quotes can only be used outside quotes. For example, set xlabel ’‘ls‘’ will not work. The best way to do this would be: set xlabel ‘echo "’" ; ls ; echo "’"‘.
Set plot titles, axis labels, axis ranges, pointsize, linestyles, etc.
Fitting of functions to data via the fit command.
Basic 2d plotting and replotting of functions and datafiles, with the following styles: lines, points, linespoints, dots, boxes, steps, fsteps, histeps, impulses, csplines, acsplines and errorbars of all flavours (see Section 3.3.5 for details of changes to errorbars).
Automatic and manual selection of linestyles, linetypes, linewidths, pointtypes and pointsizes.
Use of dual axes. Note: Operation here differs slightly from original gnuplot; dual axes are displayed whenever they are defined, there is no need to set xtics nomirror. See the details in the following chapter.
Placing arrows and textual labels on plots.
Putting grids on plots (colour can be set, but not linestyle).
Setting plot aspect ratios with set size ratio or set size square.
Multiplot (which is very significantly improved over gnuplot; see Section 3.5).
Setting major/minor tics with the set xtics and set mxtics commands.
Gnuplot features which PyXPlot does not presently support include:
Parametric function plotting.
Three-dimensional plotting (i.e. gnuplot’s splot command).