Gnuplot mouse half-working

[John W. Eaton]

On  9-Mar-2009, 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 there was a fix for gnuplot that would allow the mouse
operations to work when data is passed in a pipe, but I don't remember
when the change was made or whether it has appeared in a gnuplot
release yet.

In any case, any changes you make with the mouse or keyboard commands
will not be reflected in Octave's plot properties.

jwe