Very useful Gnuplot information

If you need a free and a powerful plotting program Gnuplot would be a good choice for you.


Especially if you are working on a Linux system, you might find many additional utilities making your life easier with Gnuplot.

Without the GUI front ends it will behave more like a command prompt. Also it is capable of reading script type of files and act accordingly.

There are a lot of good Gnuplot tutorials and help pages all over the internet. However, I think this page (not so Frequently Asked Questions) about Gnuplot goes beyond the regular help pages. There are many specific cases, but there are also many generic help.

You can even plot a butterfly with Gnuplot :). (generated using this script from Gnuplot website)

Enjoy your plots...

Small changes with Emacs

Emacs is a great editor with many different capabilities. One of the best features of Emacs is that it is highly configurable. There are several default settings that I use with Emacs in the configuration file. I will give only a couple of them. You can put these in to your local Emacs configuration file ".emacs" or ".emacs.d/.emacs" which might depend on your system.

To change your background and foreground colors to black and white:

(set-background-color "Black")
(set-foreground-color "White")

To change the cursor color:

(set-cursor-color "White")

To stop Emacs from creating auto backup files:

(setq make-backup-files nil)

There are many more options and settings you can change with Emacs. Try and enjoy it. Welcome to the world of Emacs :).