Obviously there is a lot of work here, but I am a bit confused. If you already have lab code in Julia, Matlab, R, Python, Excel, etc., what is the motivation to use this tool? Is this hot in a specific community?
tonyarkles · 6m ago
I'm in potentially the target demographic for this. I regularly bounce between R, Python, Maxima, and occasionally MATLAB/Octave. Passing data between these is usually done using the lowest common denominator: CSV. Having four completely different interfaces to these tools is a hassle. I'm also not a big fan of Jupyter and if this feels better for me it might be a decent Jupyter replacement even without the cross-language stuff.
jabl · 2h ago
I suppose this is a FOSS solution for the roughly same space occupied by commercial tools like Origin, that are very popular in some scientific communities.
They can be useful if you have other tools (e.g. measurement software) that already produces the data you want, and you just want a GUI tool to create plots, and maybe do some simple things like least squares curve fitting etc.
If you already do a lot of data wrangling in something with a programming language and plotting libraries accessible from said language, like the ones you mention, yeah, this is not the tool for you.
ajot · 1h ago
It is! I remember using this (or SciDavis, a related project) a couple of years back in college. It was not as powerful as Origin 10 years ago, but it ran on Linux.
This is great for people who don't know nor want to learn to program.
Unfortunately the only database it supports is SQLite, I really wanted to hook this up directly to a database or REST API. Going back and forth between exporting files and importing them into LabPlot is just too much work...
They can be useful if you have other tools (e.g. measurement software) that already produces the data you want, and you just want a GUI tool to create plots, and maybe do some simple things like least squares curve fitting etc.
If you already do a lot of data wrangling in something with a programming language and plotting libraries accessible from said language, like the ones you mention, yeah, this is not the tool for you.
This is great for people who don't know nor want to learn to program.
https://github.com/KDE/labplot
https://invent.kde.org/education/labplot
https://docs.labplot.org/en/import_export/import_export_sql....
https://doc.qt.io/archives/qt-5.15/sql-driver.html
Are you talking about something else?
> LabPlot is licensed under GNU General Public License, version 2.0 or later, so to put it in a few sentences:
> You are free to use LabPlot, for any purpose
> You are free to distribute LabPlot
> You can study how LabPlot works and change it
> You can distribute changed versions of LabPlot
> In the last case you have the obligation to also publish the changed source code as GPL.