Getting MUMmer’s mummerplot to play nicely with XQuartz on macOS

Having just spent a while trying to get mummerplot to work with XQuartz on a mac for at least the second time in my life, this post will surely be useful even if it merely serves as a note-to-self and helps avoid some future pain!

If this

WARNING: Unable to query clipboard with xclip

or this

set mouse clipboardformat “[%.0f, %.0f]”

looks familiar then read on!

It’s actually a very simple fix if you use Homebrew and once you know that mummerplot doesn’t play nicely with GNUPLOT 5 so you have to install gnuplot 4.6.7 instead. After uninstalling gnuplot 5 (brew uninstall gnuplot), just run:

brew install gnuplot@4 –with-x11
brew install mummer # 3.23

You’ll then have to add to path as brew’s gnuplot4 is keg-only:

echo ‘export PATH=”/usr/local/opt/gnuplot@4/bin:$PATH”‘ >> ~/.bash_profile

Now, “mummerplot out.delta” and you’ll finally have your garish xquartz plot 🙂