Gnuplot mouse half-working

[Ben Abbott]

On Mar 10, 2009, at 1:55 AM, Francesco Potorti` wrote:

>> | On Debian, Gnuplot behaves strangely for me in Octave 3.0 and 3.1  
>> (I am
>> | almost sure it used to work sometime).  Keyboard commands are  
>> understood
>> | (q, v, m, 1, 2 and others), but l (which should toggle log y  
>> scale) does
>> | not work, and selecting a zoom region with the mouse does not  
>> work.  But
>> | the mouse works, in fact I see the pointer coordinates in the  
>> lower-left
>> | corner of the windows.  If I enable the v (verbose) mode and hit l,
>> | Gnuplot tells me that it's toggling log mode, but the display  
>> does not
>> | change, even after hitting e (redraw).
>> |
>> | I have 'set mouse' in ~/.gnuplot, I use Octave 3.0.1 and 3.1.52 and
>> | Gnuplot 4.2.4.
>> |
>> | With Octave 2.1, everything works as expected, and moreover the  
>> Gnuplot
>> | window has decorations and buttons.
>> |
>> | Am I missing anything obvious?  Is this a Debian packaging bug, and
>> | Octave bug, a Gnuplot bug?
>>
>> In 2.1, Octave used temporary files for passing data to gnuplot.  In
>> 3.0 and later, data is passed in the same pipe as commands and at
>> least some versions of gnuplot disable the mouse features when data
>> is sent in the command stream.
>
> I thought that version 4.2.3 of Gnuplot had fixed this, but I am not
> sure whether I had just dreamt of it... :(
>
> Anyone having more precise info?
>
>> In any case, any changes you make with the mouse or keyboard commands
>> will not be reflected in Octave's plot properties.
>
> Sure.  However, toggling log axes and zooming would be very handy.

Running either gnuplot 4.2.3 or 4.3.x directly from the command line,  
the behavior you're looking for works for me (I did a simple "plot  
sin(x)").

However, when running Octave, I get the same behavior as you.  With  
Octave+gnuplot-4.3 I also get a warning from gnuplot.

	line 0: warning: Cannot toggle log scale for volatile data

I did  a quick google, and found an explanation on the help-octave  
mail list (although the question was different).

	https://www-old.cae.wisc.edu/pipermail/help-octave/2007-October/006005.html

Ben