Re: mouse cursor coords not x units

[<pl...@pi...>]

On 05/12/11 17:13, sfeam (Ethan Merritt) wrote:
> On Wednesday, 11 May 2011, pl...@pi... wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I work quite a lot with time data (years and month scale) . Although
>> gnuplot is very flexible in reading time data and labelling x axis the
>> mouse cursor seems a bit challenged.
>>
>> If I have "%Y %m" , having 6.004538e+09 as mouse coord is really little
>> more than useless.
>>
>> Since the scaling is available for axis labels why isn't this applied to
>> the mouse coords? It would seem to be very simple and I can't see the
>> utility in the current date in seconds.
>>
>> Is this just an oversight?
>
> Mouse coordinate readout is available in 5 or 6 different formats,
> including user-specified.  See "help mouseformat" and the help
> message printed by typing "h" in the plot window.
> In general you can cycle through the different options using the
> characters "1" and "2" as hotkeys.
>
>

Hi Ethan,

thanks for that. It appears that there is not mouseformat help but I did 
find it under mouse.


gnuplot> help mouseformat
Sorry, no help for 'mouseformat'
gnuplot> help mouse

I had tried the h key help but had not appreciated what those variables 
referred to:

  1              `builtin-decrement-mousemode`
  2              `builtin-increment-mousemode`

Maybe those terms could be more explicit, it's not clear what they refer 
to.

The content of the various modes is equally a bit arcane and the help 
doesn't:

 >> This corresponds to the key
 >> bindings '1', '2', '3', '4' (see the driver's documentation)

I find no detail for example in help wxt. What does this comment refer to?


While the subject is being raised , may I suggest a couple of possible 
feature improvements in this area?

1) This cycling of "mode" could also be done by clicking on the status 
message (click is mapped to "1" key). This would avoid switching mouse 
to keyboard which can be handy.

2) As I understand it this only shows x1y1 coords. It would clearly be 
useful when using x2y2 as well if those were available in this read-out. 
  One way to trigger this would be a click  on the legend entry for a 
line  or on/near the relevant axis. (some thought needed to avoid 
ambiguity with the new SVG toggle , pause mouse or other functions. )


Not priority issues but hopefully useful.

best regards, Peter.