Re: default: x11 or wxt?

[Ethan A M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

On Thursday 31 August 2006 12:53 am, Petr Mikulik wrote:
> What will be the default terminal for 4.2 under X11 -- x11 or wxt? 
> Currently it is wxt. 

It is only the default if all the supporting libraries are found.
People who have all the pango + cairo + wxgtl libraries may reasonably
be assumed to want to take advantage of them.

If not, then they can set GNUTERM to x11.

> However, its performance for drawing images is lower than x11.  
> Should not be x11 the default?

I personally find wxt to be preferable to x11.
The anti-aliasing makes the plots easier to read,
the font support is far more usable (UTF-8 works
with no special hacks, unlike x11),
and the user interface will I hope become extensible.

The only thing I don't like about it is the strange
behavior when you resize the plot window.

But I admit that I do not use gnuplot for drawing images,
so if the performance at that specific task is not good 
then I can understand why your preference might depend on
your typical usage.

Is the problem rendering speed, or something else?
If it is only a matter of speed, then maybe it can be
further optimized.

> What about printing the following message on gnuplot startup:
> 
>     Send bug reports and suggestions to <gnu...@li...>
>     Interactive terminals: x11, wxt
>     Interactive terminals: pm, x11
>     Interactive terminals: windows

I assume you mean to print only one of those lines on any given setup.
But why would anyone want to see that every time?

-- 
Ethan A Merritt
Biomolecular Structure Center
University of Washington, Seattle 98195-7742