Grace (plotting tool)
Template:Short description Template:Use dmy dates Template:Infobox software Grace is a free WYSIWYG 2D graph plotting tool, for Unix-like operating systems. The package name stands for "GRaphing, Advanced Computation and Exploration of data." Grace uses the X Window System and Motif for its GUI. It has been ported to VMS, OS/2, and Windows 9*/NT/2000/XP (on Cygwin). In 1996, Linux Journal described Xmgr (an early name for Grace) as one of the two most prominent graphing packages for Linux.<ref name = "linux-journal-1996"> Template:Citation</ref>
History
Grace is a descendant of the ACE/gr plotting tool (also known as Xvgr), based on Xview libraries from OpenWindows.<ref name="plasma-gate-grace"> Template:Citation</ref> Xvgr was originally written by Paul Turner of Portland, Oregon,<ref name = "plasma-gate-xmgr"> Template:Citation</ref> who continued development until version 4.00.<ref name = "plasma-gate-xmgr-doc-changes"> Template:Citation</ref> In 1996, development was taken over by the ACE/gr development team, led by Evgeny Stambulchik at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel.<ref name = "plasma-gate-xmgr-doc-intro"> Template:Citation</ref><ref name = "plasma-gate-grace-userguide"> Template:Citation</ref> Development of Xmgr was frozen at version 4.1.2 in 1998<ref name = "plasma-gate-xmgr" /> and the Grace project was started as a fork, released under the GPL.<ref name = "grace-copyright-notice"> Template:Citation</ref> The name stands for "GRaphing, Advanced Computation and Exploration of data" or "Grace Revamps ACE/gr"<ref name = "plasma-gate-grace-userguide" /> Turner still maintains a non-public version of Xmgr for internal use.<ref name = "plasma-gate-grace-userguide" /> The first version of Grace was numbered 5.0.0 and the latest stable version, 5.1.25 (released February 2015).<ref name="plasma-gate-grace" /> Whether the development of the next major release 6.0.0 is still in progress is unclear. The latest preview versions numbered 5.99.* were released in 2007.<ref name="plasma-gate-grace-devel-roadmap-6"> Template:Citation</ref>
Currently maintained versions
Noteworthy alternate versions of Grace include GraceGTK, forked from Grace 5.1.22 in 2009 by Patrick Vincent,<ref name = "gracegtk-overview"> Template:Citation</ref> and QtGrace, released in 2011 by Andreas Winter. <ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Both of these versions of Grace work natively on Windows operating systems and had releases in 2022.
Features
Grace can be used from a point-and-click interface or scripted (using either the built-in programming language or a number of language bindings). It performs both linear and nonlinear least-squares fitting to arbitrarily complex user-defined functions, with or without constraints. Other analysis tools include FFT, integration and differentiation, splines, interpolation, and smoothing.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>