After some more investigation, I found out that I didn’t have the tk backend installed on my system. I installed it and now I can open a plot window after I issue the following commands:
using PyCall
pygui(:tk)
using PyPlot
pygui(true)
However, if I try any other backends, Julia quits with the error message below when I try to plot something:
: CommandLine Error: Option 'help-list' registered more than once!
LLVM ERROR: inconsistency in registered CommandLine options
I switched to PyPlot master and things changed. Before switching to master, issuing a figure() command in the terminal didn’t open a window plot; it just printed a message like below in the terminal:
PyPlot.Figure(PyObject )
Only after doing pygui(true) and then trying to plot again I would get the LLVM error above. After switching to PyPlot master, any attempt to create a window plot (e.g., figure()) results in the LLVM error; now I don’t need to do pygui(true) in order to cause that. However, using the tk backend still works.