issue_comments

Thanks @Chilipp ! psyplot is a more professional and flexible tool (with a good doc I shall say) of what I was trying to do back then in a more DIY homemade way with planetoplot, so I will have to give it a try and most probably abandon my homemade stuff. I will also explore GeoViews and HoloViews as suggested by @JiaweiZhuang and @philippjfr because it has very interesting features. At any rate, using either xarray or xarray-based tools is a must those days for any netCDF-related exploration.

@philippjfr I had a look to Jupyterlab and for me who is already used to notebooks etc... it looks like a terrific tool! Although building an extension requires some skills. But your question is fully relevant: users not especially familiar with Python might more easily turn to a "xrview" concept as a replacement to ncview if this is a standalone app than if this is within the JupyterLab framework.

@Chilipp I have to try your psyplot tool because it looks exactly like what would be useful to me, and it is based on xarray. Did you elaborate from the matplotlib/cartopy wrapping from xarray, or did you develop your own matplotlib wrapping from scratch, only using xarray for CF-like cube exploration?

@fmaussion That's a really good point, actually I was about to code an option for automatic concat with xarray when you input several files in xarray-cli, but thought that was taking me too far for a simple example.

About you last point: I am not sure either, and that was the starting point of my questions. At least myself I like to use a python-based CLI interface for quick-but-nice-enough plots as a preliminary exploration that still allows for nearly publication-ready plots (which is not the case for ncview!). Then for more elaborate diagnostics etc etc I use python scripting. But I don't know if this translates to other people, although as @rabernat mentioned, the number of people using ncview might indicate CLI would be of interest.

It appears also that xarray is so handy that interactive use with ipython+xarray is a rather quick way to access netCDF files and have a quick exploration, although CLI would be quicker and would avoid writing the same code over and over.

Wow! Many thanks everyone. Tell me about constructive comments.

@rabernat xrview is exactly what I would have dreamed to ask for, without daring to ask. ncview is very easy for quick plots, but those plots are not publication-ready, so we end up losing time redoing stuff with Python -- thus an xarray-based tool would be killer indeed.

@JiaweiZhuang many thanks for your roadmap for a ncview replacement. I will have a look to the tools you propose when I have time. I overlooked GeoViews because I thought xarray + matplotlib + cartopy was enough for my purpose. If I come up with anything useful, I'll let everybody know. My skills in Python might not be up to the task, though, so solutions might be explored by other interested potential contributors.

@shoyer thank your for your kind message; I forgot to say initially that it was not my intent to see such a tool being included in xarray, but I am happy to see references to standalone CLI interfaces somewhere in xarray (maybe affiliated packages as mentioned here https://github.com/pydata/xarray/issues/1850). If my simple tool https://github.com/aymeric-spiga/xarray-cli can be of use to anyone, do feel free to link to it. This would be actually more than I could hope for, since this project is very basic and works mostly as a simple demonstrator. Contributions are welcome, although efforts may be more useful on the above-mentioned xrview idea

Thanks @fischcheng for your kind answer. I agree, it is my experience too to use ncdump for quick exploration, ncview for quick plots, cdo/nco for concat / averaging / anomalies etc... For the latter use, I found out Xarray had powerful methods so that I can script everything in python without a pre-processing with e.g. ncrcat. So I was wondering for an all-python solution, thus replacement for ncview since Xarray also have great plotting capabilities with thin matplotlib wrapping. But all-python replacement could also mean useless redundancy, I agree!