cannot paste lines into Gnuplot

[fpeos]

Since I upgraded to MacOS Big Sur, I am no longer able to paste a few command lines from a terminal or Aquamacs into Gnuplot. It does not recognize the newline character and falsely tries to interpret all lines as a single commands:

set xlabel "x"
set ylabel "y"
plot "tmp.txt" u 4:6 w p

When it paste these lines into Gunplot's prompt, they also show up white on black.

I updated to macOS 11.2.2., manually reinstalled Ports and Gnuplot, and followed the directions under ticket #62364 but it still does not work. Since I cut and paste a few lines often, a fix would be appreciated. Thanks for your time.

[mf2k (Frank Schima)]

In the future, please use WikiFormatting, fill in the Port field and add the port maintainer(s) to Cc (port info --maintainers gnuplot), if any.

[kencu (Ken)]

To be specific, do you mean that when you run gnuplot from the terminal, by opening Terminal.app and typing "gnuplot", you get this behaviour?

[fpeos]

Replying to kencu:

To be specific, do you mean that when you run gnuplot from the terminal, by opening Terminal.app and typing "gnuplot", you get this behaviour?

Correct. I open the Terminal.app, type gnuplot into the prompt. Gnuplot starts up fine, all commands work but I cannot paste multiple lines at once because the line breaks are no longer recognized.

[kencu (Ken)]

Catalina and BigSur have a new default shell, zsh. Up to Mojave, macOS used bash.

Is it possible you are seeing some difference in shell behaviour?

You can apparently change your shell <​https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/change-default-shell-to-bash-on-macos-catalina/> although I haven't tried it.

[fpeos]

I do not think the shell by itself is the root of the problem for two reasons:

a) These problems did not show up in Catalina but probably with the Big Sur 11.2.1.

b) When I start zsh first and then start Gnuplot from the zsh prompt, the problems persist. (I have not tried to change my default shell, which I have set to 'tcsh' for historic reasons.)

[fpeos]

I changed my default shell to zsh but this did not make any difference.

[kencu (Ken)]

The MacPorts version of gnuplot was updated to a new release Jan 10, 2021

<​https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/commits/master/math/gnuplot/Portfile>

there are lots of changes in the new version, and perhaps some of these are relevant to you?

<​http://www.gnuplot.info/ReleaseNotes_5_4.html>

If you need the old version 5.2.8, it might be possible for you to try to do that:

<​https://trac.macports.org/wiki/howto/InstallingOlderPort>

If you find there is something about the new 5.4.x version that could be tweaked in some way to fulfill your needs and you need/want/desire some adjustment or variant to be made/enabled, that is probably possible too, with some information about how that might best be done.

Basically, the whole idea is to make these ports work properly for people who use them -- and sometimes the people who use them see things that the people who bump them to new versions might not see.