GUI Editor

gleplot ships an optional desktop editor built on PySide6 for building figures interactively – load data, map columns to series, style everything from dockable property panels, arrange subplots, and export – all with a live preview that recompiles as you edit.

Downloads

Two ways to get the editor:

  • Prebuilt desktop app (no Python needed) – download the Windows .exe installer or the macOS (Apple silicon / arm64) .dmg from the GitHub Releases page. The macOS build is unsigned, so the first launch needs a right-click ▸ Open (or xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine on the .app).

  • From pip – install into a Python environment:

    pip install "gleplot[gui]"

Either way, GLE 4.3+ is a separate prerequisite (see below).

The pip extra adds PySide6>=6.5 on top of gleplot’s core dependencies. Importing the base gleplot package never pulls in Qt – only gleplot.gui does – so scripts that only generate GLE output are unaffected either way.

GLE prerequisite

The editor needs GLE 4.3 or newer for the live preview and for exporting any compiled format (PDF/PNG/EPS/SVG/JPG). GLE is a separate program: install it from the GLE releases page and make it discoverable: point the editor at it via Tools ▸ GLE Setup…, put it on PATH, or set the GLE_PATH environment variable. The status bar shows the detected GLE path or GLE: not found. Without GLE the object-model editing still works (load data, add and style series, arrange subplots, Save and Open native .gle files) – only the live preview and compiled exports are unavailable; the raw .gle-script export still works.

Launching

gleplot-gui

This is a console-script entry point (gleplot.gui.app:main) that opens the main editor window and runs the Qt event loop.

What it provides

  • A central live preview that recompiles the figure via GLE as you edit, debounced so rapid edits don’t trigger a compile per keystroke. It renders as a vector SVG by default, with an automatic, sticky fallback to PNG for the rest of the session if SVG output isn’t usable (a View ▸ Vector preview (SVG) toggle switches between the two manually).

  • On-canvas text annotations: add, drag, double-click-edit, and delete free-form text labels directly on the preview, in sync both ways with a dedicated Texts tab in the Properties dock.

  • A Data dock for loading delimited data files (CSV/.dat/.txt) and creating series by mapping columns, either importing the data or referencing the file in place. Generated .dat sidecars carry a named header row (derived from each series’ label) instead of anonymous column numbers.

  • A Properties dock with Layout, Figure, Axes, Series, and Texts tabs for point-and-click styling, subplot arrangement, and annotation editing.

  • An Output dock listing structured compile errors with line/column information when GLE reports it, plus any recovery warnings raised when a .gle file is opened.

  • Native ``.gle`` files via File ▸ Save / Open: Save writes a plain GLE script (Figure.savefig_gle, with imported data as named .dat sidecars) and Open parses it back into the editor (gleplot.parser.recognizer.parse_gle_figure), tolerantly preserving any unrecognized content as raw GLE (a read-only Raw GLE tab).

  • An export dialog producing PDF, PNG, EPS, SVG, JPG, or a raw .gle script, optionally bundled into a folder with its data files. Exports always compile the figure exactly as saved, independent of anything the live preview substitutes for on-screen rendering.

  • Undo/redo and a read-only preview mode for .gle files that use GLE programming constructs.

For a full walkthrough – loading data, picking columns, styling series, arranging subplots, saving a figure, and exporting – along with the native .gle format (open-time normalizations and raw-GLE preservation), GLE-discovery behavior, and current limitations, see the GUI Editor Guide. A ready-to-open example figure lives in examples/gui/ in the source repository.