Plot window showing up when run from terminal in Plots.jl

General Usage
1

Hi, my problem is as described here.

I’m using Plots.jl with the default backend to plot an image and save the figure.

using Plots: plot, savefig
plot(rangex,rangey,some_image,xticks,yticks,...);
savefig("name.jpg");

this works perfectly fine with Juno IDE on Windows. But my final code is expected to run in the terminal. When I try to run the same code in terminal it becomes super slow and in each plot I see a GKS QtTerm window appear and disappear for a moment. Is there a way to disable this window?

EDIT: Here I did some tests about runtime, and I used 100 iterations of plot() function.

In Atom Juno:
starting julia + loading libraries & functions took about 36s
doing 100 plot iterations took about 55s
total of 91 seconds.

In Windows cmd:
starting julia + loading libraries & functions took about 21s
doing 100 plot iterations took about 284 seconds
total of 305 seconds.

2 
plot(...);

A Plot is only displayed when returned (a semicolon will suppress the return), or if explicitly displayed with display(plt) , gui() , or by adding show = true to your plot command.

1 Like
3

I’m using the semicolon, and additionally, I just tried the show = false parameter in plot() function. however, the window still flashes when ran from the terminal.

4

not sure, I don’t see it on Linux (maybe my windows manager is playing with me).

Notice this shouldn’t make your code slow, 80 seconds is because you’re running a flesh session of Julia right?

5

maybe it is just a windows issue. I directly run the code from the windows command line

cmd > julia.exe mycode.jl

In my code, I use a for loop and I call plot() function inside this loop. If it was to compile libraries or functions in the first iteration, I would totally understand. But it doesn’t seem like that, and it is slow on every iteration.

6

if you start your IDE anew and run in that?

7

starting the IDE and getting the libraries ready takes about 70 seconds. But I do @time only when the iterations start, after the libraries are loaded, so the terminal adds up another 80 seconds to this time.

EDIT: I will clarify the runtimes after doing some tests and add them to the post.

8

this happens in julia script.jl every time

9

Add

ENV[“GKSwstype”]=“nul”

To suppress the window.

10

Now I’m getting

GKS: invalid workstation type (null)

in the terminal, the window still appears, it works just fine but as slow as before.

11

ENV["GKSwstype"] = "nul"

solved my problem! And it is not “null” as I tried before, it is “nul” :slight_smile:
Thank you so much.