An introduction

The GR.jl module provides a Julia interface to GR, a framework for visualisation applications.

Installation

From the Julia REPL an up to date version can be installed with:

    Pkg.add("GR")

or in the Pkg REPL-mode:

    ] add GR

The Julia package manager will download and install a pre-compiled run-time (for your hardware architecture), if the GR software is not already installed in the recommended locations.

With this installation method, no additional Julia packages are needed. However, on Linux, certain system packages may have to be installed, e.g. a basic Qt5 run-time environment. For further information about the requirements for your distribution please refer to the installation instructions.

Getting started

In Julia simply type using GR and begin calling functions in the GR framework API.

Let’s start with a simple example. We generate 10,000 random numbers and create a histogram. The histogram function automatically chooses an appropriate number of bins to cover the range of values in x and show the shape of the underlying distribution.

using GR
histogram(randn(10000))

More examples can be found here or in the tutorial section.

Using GR as backend for Plots.jl

Plots is a powerful wrapper around other Julia visualization “backends”, where GR seems to be one of the favorite ones. To get an impression how complex visualizations may become easier with Plots, take a look at these examples.

Plots is great on its own, but the real power comes from the ecosystem surrounding it. You can find more information here.

Alternatives

Besides GR and Plots there is a nice package called GRUtils which provides a user-friendly interface to the low-level GR subsytem, but in a more “Julian” and modular style. Newcomers are recommended to use this package. A detailed documentation can be found here.

GR and GRUtils are currently still being developed in parallel - but there are plans to merge the two modules in the future.