SmoothLivePlot.jl

SmoothLivePlot.jl is a Julia package for creating live-style plots during calculations.

Motivation

Updating the Juno plot plane during calculations creates new plots on top of the old ones. This produces a flickering effect e.g.:

• Can you update a plot in Julia?
• Current State of Live Plots in Atom/Juno?
• Suppress Plot Window when output to animation

To smoothly update of plots, I generalised a solution found by user ckneale. It uses Observables.jl and WebIO.jl so that the plot can listen to changes in its elements.

Currently, I have tested the following capabilities:

• Modifying values in X and/or Y array(s) in scatter and plot
• Modifying colours in scatter and plot
• Modifying text elements (e.g. titles, xlabels, etc...)
• Modifying matricies in contour plots
• Adding new elements to X,Y arrays in 2d line and scatter plots
• Adding new elements to X,Y,Z in 3d line and scatter plots

Note: this package is designed to work with the plot plane in Juno. If you force it to plot in a gui it will look really weird.

Using the package

1. Import the module using using SmoothLivePlot.
2. Create a live plot with macro outPlotObject = @makeLivePlot myPlotFunction(argument1, argument2, ...).
   • Function myPlotFunction(argument1, argument2, ...) is a user defined plotting function.
   • Output outPlotObject is a mutable output array of plot features. Its elements are the input aruments of myPlotFunction().
3. Modify plot elements with function modifyPlotObject!(outPlotObject, arg2 = newArg2, arg1 = newArg1, ...).
   • The first argment of modifyPlotObject!() must be the mutable output array.
   • The following argments are optional and named. The name/value pair must be arg<x> = newArg1, where <x> in the name is an integer that indicates the position of the argument in the original plotting function myPlotFunction().
   • E.g. to modify argument2 to newArgument2, use modifyPlotObject!(outPlotObject, arg2 = newArgument2).
   • The modified arguments do not have to be in any specific order, and are updated at the same time.

Short example

Here's a video showing an output live-plot from some magnetohydrodynamic calculations:

TODOs

• Add capability to add additional elements to plots.
• Benchmark performance.

Changelog

• Version 0.1.0 - Introduced original version.