3.7 Querying the values of settings

As the previous section has demonstrated, the set command is used in a wide range of ways to configure the way in which plots appear; we will meet many more in due course. The corresponding show command can be used to query the current values of settings. To query the value of one particular setting, the show command should be followed by the name of the setting, as in the example:

show title

Alternatively, several settings may be queried at once, or all settings beginning with a certain string of characters can be listed, as in the following two examples:

show xlabel ylabel key
show g

The special keyword settings may be used to display the values of all settings which can be set with the set command. A list of other special keywords which the show command accepts is given in Table 3.3.

Query	Description
`all`	Lists all settings.
`axes`	Lists all of the currently configured axes.
`functions`	Lists all currently defined mathematical functions, both those which are built into Pyxplot and those which the user has defined.
`settings`	Lists the current values of all settings which can be set with the `set` command.
`units`	Lists all of the physical units which Pyxplot is currently set up to recognise.
`userfunctions`	Lists all current user-defined mathematical functions and subroutines.
`variables`	Lists the values of all currently-defined variables.

Table 3.3: The special keywords which the show command recognises.

Generally, the show command displays each setting in the form of a typeable set command which could be used to set that setting, together with a comment to briefly explain what effect the setting has. This means that the output can be pasted directly into another Pyxplot terminal to copy settings from one session to another. However, some settings such as papersize are only pastable once the set numerics typeable command has been issued, for reasons which will be explained in Section 4.7.3.

When a color-highlighted interactive session is used, settings which have been changed are highlighted in yellow, whilst those settings which are unchanged from Pyxplot’s default configuration, or from a user-supplied configuration file, are shown in green.