I'm afraid I don't understand your comment - both Plots.jl as well as Makie.jl (the two most commonly used plotting packages, as far as I know) support all of those things. Makie.jl does so natively, Plots.jl does so if the backend (e.g. Plotly, PyPlot) supports interactivity (the rest is available by default). Do you mind giving an example, such that this could be improved further?

Ye sorry I meant in the plot window (GUI), not the scripting. For data processing of lab measurements zooming and panning, brushing, "drag to select" etc in an easy way is really convenient since you don't know where in the plot interesting stuff will be in advance. Adding titles and labels, text arrows etc is a nice extra.

Matlab have quite good such capabilities, Octave is more limited (you can't add titles, labels, regression lines or brush away data points, get simple data statistics like sums or std devs like in Matlab, but you can zoom and pan, save to file etc).

Julia seems to launch a Qt-window with plot, so adding some menu bar with zoom and pan shouldn't add too much bloat.

E.g. exploring roots benefits from zooming a lot.

EDIT:

You seem to be able to switch "backend" of Plots to eg. PyPlot for some functionality I didn't know that.

Yes precisely - it's not the frontend that's doing the lifting here. The interactivity as you describe it depends on if the backend supports it, which not all do.

I agree that there's room for improvement here, but I also think that it won't happen in Plots.jl (and if it does, it'll depend on a backend that already provides interactivity). I think it'll be more likely to see something like this plop out of Makie.jl or something built on top of Makie.jl, as that has a lot of primitves for interactivity available already.

There are absolutely labels, titles, and the ability to save figures to files.

I used to deliver project reports to customers using a combination of Julia and LaTeX. It was perfectly suitable for that application.

I think they mean no GUI for that. To manually (rather than programatically) do this.

...it's a programming language, not an Excel competitor.

You could use Julia to build some kind of GUI plot-making tool.

> Octave but with nice string concatenation

As a heavy octave user, I never felt a need to concatenate strings in any way. But I'd be happy if julia was an Octave but with fast loops, which it sort of is; but still not really there.

When you use Matlab/Simulink for c-code generation and use it for a lot of purposes Matlab was not really made for you might run into processing strings.

But ye for normal use it is not really a problem.