Grace is a free

WYSIWYG In computing, WYSIWYG ( ), an acronym for what you see is what you get, refers to software that allows content to be edited in a form that resembles its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product, such as a printed document, web ...

2D graph plotting tool, for

Unix-like A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X, *nix or *NIX) operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, although not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Uni ...

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

s. The package name stands for "GRaphing, Advanced Computation and Exploration of data." Grace uses the

X Window System The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X originated as part of Project Athena at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1984. The X protocol has been at ...

and Motif for its GUI. It has been ported to VMS,

OS/2 OS/2 is a Proprietary software, proprietary computer operating system for x86 and PowerPC based personal computers. It was created and initially developed jointly by IBM and Microsoft, under the leadership of IBM software designer Ed Iacobucci, ...

, and

Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

9*/NT/2000/XP (on

Cygwin Cygwin ( ) is a free and open-source Unix-like environment and command-line interface (CLI) for Microsoft Windows. The project also provides a software repository containing open-source packages. Cygwin allows source code for Unix-like operati ...

). In 1996,

Linux Journal ''Linux Journal'' (''LJ'') is an American monthly technology magazine originally published by Specialized System Consultants, Inc. (SSC) in Seattle, Washington since 1994. In December 2006 the publisher changed to Belltown Media, Inc. in Hous ...

described Xmgr (an early name for Grace) as one of the two most prominent graphing packages for

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

History

Grace is a descendant of the ACE/gr plotting tool (also known as Xvgr), based on Xview libraries from OpenWindows. Xvgr was originally written by Paul Turner of Portland, Oregon, who continued development until version 4.00. In 1996, development was taken over by the ACE/gr development team, led by Evgeny Stambulchik at the

Weizmann Institute of Science The Weizmann Institute of Science ( ''Machon Weizmann LeMada'') is a Public university, public research university in Rehovot, Israel, established in 1934, fourteen years before the State of Israel was founded. Unlike other List of Israeli uni ...

Israel Israel, officially the State of Israel, is a country in West Asia. It Borders of Israel, shares borders with Lebanon to the north, Syria to the north-east, Jordan to the east, Egypt to the south-west, and the Mediterranean Sea to the west. Isr ...

. Development of Xmgr was frozen at version 4.1.2 in 1998 and the Grace project was started as a

fork In cutlery or kitchenware, a fork (from 'pitchfork') is a utensil, now usually made of metal, whose long handle terminates in a head that branches into several narrow and often slightly curved tines with which one can spear foods either to h ...

, released under the

GPL The GNU General Public Licenses (GNU GPL or simply GPL) are a series of widely used free software licenses, or ''copyleft'' licenses, that guarantee end users the freedom to run, study, share, or modify the software. The GPL was the first c ...

. The name stands for "GRaphing, Advanced Computation and Exploration of data" or "Grace Revamps ACE/gr" Turner still maintains a non-public version of Xmgr for internal use. The first version of Grace was numbered 5.0.0 and the latest stable version, 5.1.25 (released February 2015). 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.

Currently maintained versions

Noteworthy alternate versions of Grace include GraceGTK, forked from Grace 5.1.22 in 2009 by Patrick Vincent, and QtGrace, released in 2011 by Andreas Winter. Both of these versions of Grace work natively on

operating systems and had releases in 2022.

Features

Grace can be used from a

point-and-click Point and click are one of the actions of a computer user moving a pointer to a certain location on a screen (''pointing'') and then pressing a button on a mouse or other pointing device (''click''). An example of point and click is in hypermedi ...

interface or scripted (using either the built-in programming language or a number of

language binding In programming and software design, a binding is an application programming interface (API) that provides glue code specifically made to allow a programming language to use a foreign library or operating system service (one that is not native to ...

s). It performs both

linear In mathematics, the term ''linear'' is used in two distinct senses for two different properties: * linearity of a '' function'' (or '' mapping''); * linearity of a '' polynomial''. An example of a linear function is the function defined by f(x) ...

and

nonlinear In mathematics and science, a nonlinear system (or a non-linear system) is a system in which the change of the output is not proportional to the change of the input. Nonlinear problems are of interest to engineers, biologists, physicists, mathe ...

least-squares The method of least squares is a mathematical optimization technique that aims to determine the best fit function by minimizing the sum of the squares of the differences between the observed values and the predicted values of the model. The me ...

fitting to arbitrarily complex user-defined functions, with or without constraints. Other analysis tools include FFT,

integration Integration may refer to: Biology *Multisensory integration *Path integration * Pre-integration complex, viral genetic material used to insert a viral genome into a host genome *DNA integration, by means of site-specific recombinase technology, ...

and differentiation, splines,

interpolation In the mathematics, mathematical field of numerical analysis, interpolation is a type of estimation, a method of constructing (finding) new data points based on the range of a discrete set of known data points. In engineering and science, one ...

, and smoothing.

Programs using Grace

GROMACS GROMACS is a molecular dynamics package mainly designed for simulations of proteins, lipids, and nucleic acids. It was originally developed in the Biophysical Chemistry department of University of Groningen, and is now maintained by contributors ...

MOLPRO MOLPRO is a software package used for accurate ''Ab initio quantum chemistry methods, ab initio'' quantum chemistry calculations. It is developed by Peter Knowles at Cardiff University and Hans-Joachim Werner at Universität Stuttgart in collabor ...

NAMD Nanoscale Molecular Dynamics (NAMD, formerly Not Another Molecular Dynamics Program) is computer software for molecular dynamics simulation, written using the Charm++ parallel programming model (not to be confused with CHARMM). It is noted for its ...

Visual Molecular Dynamics Visual Molecular Dynamics (VMD) is a molecular modelling and Visualization (computer graphics), visualization computer program. VMD is developed mainly as a tool to view and analyze the results of molecular dynamics simulations. It also includes ...

* AptPlot

References

{{Reflist

External links