I'm using Octave 4.0.0 on a fresh Windows 10 installation and the graphics toolkit related functions (such as plot()
or hist()
) are simply not working. plot()
creates a new window that freezes immediately in the GUI and no windows at all in the CLI (Octave crashes in both cases). I made sure that graphics_toolkit()
was set to "gnuplot"
and not "fltk"
, but I did not see any improvment. Any suggestion?

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3It worked here, but it took more than 1 minute to show the plot. It seems to happen only on the first plot. I ran this: `plot(rand(1, 20))`. – Rafael Monteiro Aug 07 '15 at 19:05
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It actually worked, altough it took much longer than one minute. Gotta be more patient on this notebook. Thanks a lot! – Crolle Aug 07 '15 at 20:49
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2Are you using the MXE build from https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/octave/windows/? Do you see the 1 minute delay with qt, fltk both in the GUI and CLI? I suggest writing a bug report here http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/octave/ with these details so we can try to triage the problem – Andy Aug 09 '15 at 09:18
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Worked for me as well on Octave 4.0.1! I've never experienced this with any software i.e. first time plot hangs for a minute and then it starts working. @Rafael Monteiro - You should put that down as an answer. – Plasty Grove Apr 18 '16 at 21:29
3 Answers
The first time you use plot
, imagesc
, or something else that uses plotting functions it will cause Octave to hang for a while (potentially minutes). It may be quicker to plot a small dataset with plot([1 2 3 4])
initially.
After the initial plot, subsequent ones should be quick, even if you reopen Octave or reboot your computer.
This happens consistently using Octave is 4.0.0
-4.0.2
, and potentially in other versions on Windows 10.

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Your PC needs to be installed gnuplot separately from SourceForge as Octave gets some errors while installing itself in W8/10.
Here is the link attached. https://sourceforge.net/projects/gnuplot/?source=directory
You don't need to change any installation files.
This should work

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I have 4.2.0 running on Windows 7. The first time plot takes about a couple of minutes and its faster from then on. The toolkit is "qt".

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