I've been using Plottable recently and it's great. Hope it gets more widely used so there's more material out there about it - it's SUPER powerful but the documentation is hard to understand if you're really trying to extend it.
Wow, very cool. Personally I'm not really interested in trying to go through building something like what you've done for myself, haha.
I've come across Plotters before but last time I checked, the documentation was pretty sparse and I didn't really relish the thought of trying to parse though and tweak the examples at that time. It looks like they're gradually filling out the docs now, though, so maybe I'll give it another go.
The biggest draw to me is actually the non-visual part of it. I don't get hung up on silly visual things such as column width. Or, where to put the plots I make.
Granted, this has its own downsides. But so far I'm loving it. And yes, being able to essentially save off just what I did so that I can rerun the same tasks again later on a new data set is really really nice.
For me the most useful features of Plot over other libraries are the declarative transforms: bin, stack, map, filter, etc. This means that a lot of the data munging that you would normally do before passing things off to the plotting library are done by Plot itself. Why would you want that? Well these transforms are now "facet aware" - if you want to facet on some some qualitative property, slap a `fx: property` on your mark and your transforms will then be run for each subplot.
Secondly, I simply find the API to be very tastefully built. The Geo API (https://observablehq.com/plot/marks/geo) is a particular highlight. I've used Plot for about 1.5 years for recreational side projects - it has genuinely kept me entertained for many hours in no small part due to its interface design.
This is a very interesting project! I love maplotlib but sometimes getting it to do what I want is an absolute chore. I may give this a shot with some of my next figures.
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