Here’s the problem: you're in Emacs and you have data that you want to visualize quickly and share with others. Ideally you don’t want to work hard to achieve this, much less having to code anything. At best, you want a lightweight tool that can provide you instant analysis and is able to present the results smartly. And no wasting time trying to wrangle an LLM to do this.

The venerable program Gnuplot has long promised to deliver on the above, but in practice the results are decidedly mixed. While Gnuplot can plot the most demanding of data sets, its syntax is arcane and has default output settings that produce visually unremarkable results. You can make Gnuplot’s output look beautiful, but the toil of achieving it is usually more trouble than it’s worth.

I’ve been playing with an idea to address these downsides by layering an Emacs-based keyboard-driven menu interface on top of Gnuplot. It is a progression of the work I’ve done for the Casual project and builds on top of Gnuplot for Emacs. Straightforwardly, I’ve named this project Casual Gnuplot.

This idea has gone well past a thought experiment though. For the past month (August 2025), I’ve worked on a proof of concept (PoC) to see how viable a Transient-based UI for Gnuplot would be. A video of it in action is shown below.

As promising as this video looks, it is far from being a robust, production-level tool. To get it to that level, I estimate that it will take about three to four months working full-time to achieve it. I have a number of ideas on what its shipping feature set should be, but among them are these non-negotiables:

• Built expressly for use in Emacs.
• Local first design.
• No telemetry.
• Both free ideologically (GPLv3) and free as in beer.

That said, the scope of this project is daunting. I’m at somewhat of an impasse on what to do next. One part of me says I should try to get funding before moving forward with this. Another part says, “for what, an open source project with a minuscule user base?” Another part says, "what would funding even look like?" Other questions: Who is this for? Is anybody asking for this?

Ultimately, I think I need more feedback. So I’m cross-posting to Mastodon, Reddit, and HN to see what discourse happens.

As always, folks who want to financially support my efforts on the Casual project (both past and future) can do so by buying me a coffee.

See you in the chats.

Video music: Ideal - Whatever (JON REYES FINDAWAY BLEND)

emacs