Adding ncmaps as default

[mankoff]

Hello,

I've been adding some improvements to ncview over the past few years. I'm also a big fan of your colormap support. I've just fixed the bug that caused the -repl option on the CLI to be ignored (I personally like to see things closer to the real pixelated data, not bilinear). I noticed you mention a bug here than limits ncview to 79 colormaps. If you can provide any hints to where that bug is, I will look into fixing it. I'm also happy to make these maps the default maps going forward, and/or include them into the ncview version I'm maintaining. I do not know if this version will ever be packaged and distributed, but given that the current maintainer hasn't replied to emails or fixed bugs in a while, and I hear he has stopped distributing ncview due to California age verification laws, I may end up packaging and releasing newer versions.

[mankoff]

https://github.com/mankoff/ncview

[TomLav]

Hello Ken,

It would be great if ncview could continue via your fork. I hope you get help for bundling / shipping from the community.

The hypothesis of a bug limiting ncview to 79 colormaps was by @samhatfield in #5 . Personally, I read the ncview codebase but was never able to build it, and thus investigate what went wrong.

Let me know if I can help putting the ncmaps by default in your distribution. It's been a long time now, but I think I remember ncview has its default colormaps in a .h file. We could encode the ncmaps colormaps in this .h file. If you want to go this way, let's open an issue in your repo.

I have another idea / request for ncview (not related to colormaps). If it is fine for your I will create a separate issue in your repo, then you can assess how useful / hard it is.

[mankoff]

Yes, colormaps are just rgb sequences in .h files. See https://github.com/mankoff/ncview/blob/main/src/colormaps_default.h or for example,

static int cmap_default[] = {0,0,0, 128,128,128, 255,255,255};

Opening an issue or PR at https://github.com/mankoff/ncview/ is fine. We should discuss if the initial default map should remain as default for historical users. I'll look into the 79 bug.