I used Dear Imgui for the simple Mech Warfare control application I built earlier and was relatively impressed with the conciseness with which one could develop effective (although not necessarily the prettiest), interactive and response user interfaces in C++.  For some time I had been planning on developing a new diagnostic application for the mjbots quad that would allow plotting like the original tplot.py, but would also integrate recorded video and 3D rendering and diagnostics.  I had assumed I would use HTML/JS because it is the cool new thing, but I never got up the energy to make it happen, because every technical step along the way had big hurdles.  I figured I would give Dear Imgui a try, but the big thing it was missing was plotting support.

In the original tplot.py, I used matplotlib for plotting integration.  It is a high quality python library that can make interactive plots in nearly every imaginable form as well as production quality static plots.  It integrates with a number of GUI toolkits, in tplot I used it along with PySide.  The downside is, that given that it supports nearly anything under the sun, the code itself is relatively complex and hard to tweak.  In order to make tplot.py support multiple axes I had to do some careful source inspection to figure out which undocumented things could be poked.

Dear ImGui itself has a bare bones plotting system, but that doesn’t have anywhere near the feature set I would need.  The next system I seriously considered is implot.  It is very new, as in its repository is only a few weeks old, but already supported most of what I needed for a diagnostic tool.  The biggest thing it didn’t have was support for multiple Y axes.

So I took a stab at adding them!

One weekend later, I was largely successful:

Only a day after that and Evan had fixed up a few remaining problems and got it merged into master: https://github.com/epezent/implot/commit/5eb4b713849