[vietjtnguyen]

I use https://github.com/dkogan/vnlog/ and feedgnuplot for $WORK and it strikes a wonderful balance of simplicity and effectiveness for both quick data exploration and shell scripted data analysis and report generation.

What took me a bit to grok at the start was how feedgnuplot's different flags change how it assigns semantic meaning to different data columns. So by default the first column is simply treated as data (y) while the implicit row index becomes the x axis. If you add --domain the first column becomes your domain (x) and the second column your data (y) allowing you to create a scatter plot. If you have multiple curves you can add --dataid with --domain which makes the first column x, the second column the id of the curve that point belongs to, and the third column the data itself (y). You can throw in more dimensions of visualization by mapping columns to colors, point size, or 3d.

Typing it out it sounds more complicated than it really is. Combined with vnlog to easily select columns and filter rows it becomes a really powerful command line tool set.