Blank plots in Julia 1.6+ and GR 0.57.4

General Usage
1

I am getting completely blank plots since I updated Plots to 1.12 in Julia 1.6. I also installed 1.6.1 and added Plots, with the same result:

image
image1275×572 90.5 KB

The output of ]st is below, in any case. Anyone has any idea of what can be going wrong? Posted an issue here.

st 
(@v1.6) pkg> st
      Status `~/.julia/environments/v1.6/Project.toml`
  [6e4b80f9] BenchmarkTools v0.7.0
  [336ed68f] CSV v0.8.4
  [b630d9fa] CheapThreads v0.2.3
  [46823bd8] Chemfiles v0.9.3
  [35d6a980] ColorSchemes v3.12.0
  [6f35c628] ComplexMixtures v0.4.3
  [a93c6f00] DataFrames v1.0.1
  [e30172f5] Documenter v0.26.3
  [35a29f4d] DocumenterTools v0.1.10
  [fde71243] EasyFit v0.5.4
  [7a1cc6ca] FFTW v1.4.0
  [cc61a311] FLoops v0.1.10
  [59287772] Formatting v0.4.2
  [c58ffaec] FortranFiles v0.6.0
  [4c0ca9eb] Gtk v1.1.7
  [f67ccb44] HDF5 v0.15.4
  [7073ff75] IJulia v1.23.2
  [18364772] IPython v0.5.0
  [0f8b85d8] JSON3 v1.8.1
  [b964fa9f] LaTeXStrings v1.2.1
  [bdcacae8] LoopVectorization v0.12.12
  [33e6dc65] MKL v0.4.0
  [6741aa20] Neptune v0.14.0
  [6fd5a793] Octavian v0.2.13
  [429524aa] Optim v1.3.0
  [e29189f1] PDBTools v0.12.0
  [8314cec4] PGFPlotsX v1.2.10
  [d96e819e] Parameters v0.12.2
  [91a5bcdd] Plots v1.12.0
  [c3e4b0f8] Pluto v0.14.3
  [7f904dfe] PlutoUI v0.7.1
  [08abe8d2] PrettyTables v1.0.0
  [92933f4c] ProgressMeter v1.5.0
  [1fd47b50] QuadGK v2.4.1
  [295af30f] Revise v3.1.15
  [efcf1570] Setfield v0.7.0
  [f62ebe17] ShortCodes v0.3.2
  [aa65fe97] SnoopCompile v2.6.0
  [e2b509da] SnoopCompileCore v2.5.2
  [860ef19b] StableRNGs v1.0.0
  [90137ffa] StaticArrays v1.1.1
  [856f2bd8] StructTypes v1.7.2
  [0c5d862f] Symbolics v0.1.24
  [b189fb0b] ThreadPools v1.2.1
  [a759f4b9] TimerOutputs v0.5.8
  [bc48ee85] Tullio v0.2.14
  [1986cc42] Unitful v1.7.0
  [33b4df10] VectorizedRNG v0.2.8
  [9fa8497b] Future
  [de0858da] Printf

edit: the problem is with GR (with pyplot the plot appears). GR is in its latest version (0.57.4) and I have ran build GR again already.

2

No problems on Win10 Julia 1.6.1, with Plots v1.12.0 gr back-end.
The plot below is not blank:

using Plots;gr()
plot(rand(10),rand(10))
1 Like
3

I updated my Linux distribution, restarted, and plots appear again. :man_shrugging:

1 Like
4

I’m happy for you, but it sounds kind of annoying that you need to mess with the OS to get GR to work.

5

I am not sure what it was. When I said that I updated I mean I did a package update and restarted. Not a reinstall. It might be only some issue with the running session after some upgrade. We’ll never know.

6

Fyi, I have just encountered similar empty plots (gr backend of Plots) in Win 11, and couldn’t solve the problem.

Then I noticed that my GKS QtTerm window title had a large number in parentheses (and I see 29 in your snapshot).

The solution was to run Windows Task Manager and kill the gksqt.exe task which was running in the background. After that, the new plots display fine.

2 Likes
7

Late reply, but thank you. That’s exactly the hint I needed to get non-empty plots again on Linux with 1.10.2. Tried all the usual stuff, plotting directly with GR worked, savefig() worked, clearing ~/.julia did not make any difference, etc.

Killing gksqt did the trick… What the heck is that process supposed to do anyway?

Edit: wait, is gksqt a separate display process that stays around even if you close the window? And is (17) (in my case) the number of replots?

1 Like
8

This goes to the structure of GR: GitHub - sciapp/gr: GR framework: a graphics library for visualisation applications

GKS stands for Graphical Kernel System. QT refers to the QT graphical framework.

GKS QT is program that serves as an adapter between GKS and QT.

Basically this creates a QT application window and then listens to port 8410

In principal, this should shut down when Julia shuts down, but there might be some circumstances when that cannot occur properly.