Hi Tom, thanks for the reply, and just to be clear, I love your work on Plots, not trying to complain, just discussing a long-term usability point.
I don't fully understand the mechanisms under the covers that open a UI window. This is via Electron I presume? You're certainly correct that a UI window popping up in an IJulia context would constitute very unexpected behavior. But is there no way to distinguish between plotting to a file vs. plotting within an IJulia context. vs. REPL vs. command line execution (which might best default to REPL behavior)? It seems like plotting to a file would require a save-to-file argument, and the difference between an IJulia context and otherwise could be detected. But I'm pretty new to this, so I don't know what is or isn't possible. I also meant this question to address all such UI windows. For example, with the Images module, I would hope for a consistent "standard" approach across Julia packages, which is context aware. For example, I would hope that both `view(myimage)` and `view(myimage);` from the ImageView module would pop up a window in the REPL, and command line, and automatically display in-line in IJulia (I think save-to-file isn't relevant in that case). After installing the ImageView, Image, and TestImage package, it does in fact work in the REPL as I suggested, but unexpectedly pops up a UI window in IJulia, so in that case the user gets the unexpected behavior that you're commenting on. However even that is many times better than a silent failure, as far as unexpected behavior goes. If there's a switch in there to display inline in IJulia it's now clear to me that I need to go find it, but with silent failure, troubleshooting is many times harder. And as STAR0SS mentioned, it ends up feeling buggy to a an uninitiated user. Dave On Sunday, May 22, 2016 at 3:51:40 AM UTC-7, Tom Breloff wrote: > > If you have suggestions for the docs, I'm all ears, but I think the > default behavior is here to stay. There are too many scenarios where a gui > window is not what you want... Writing to a png, inline plotting in IJulia, > etc, and it already displays automatically when returned to the repl. > > On Sunday, May 22, 2016, David Parks <davidp...@gmail.com <javascript:>> > wrote: > >> function test(); for i=1:2; plot(); end; end; test() # Another >> favorite gotcha, plot in a loop mysteriously and silently acted >> differently than plot outside of a loop >> >> >>