Day of defeat source trench circle map2/28/2023 ![]() In many ways it is our most ambitious release as it seeks to strengthen GMT while retaining compatibility with the myriad of existing GMT scripts that have been written to date. With this article, we present and discuss the latest major release of GMT, version 6, which has been in development for 3 years. It took almost 10 years for the next major release, as it included a major migration to a C-language Application Program Interface (API). Minor updates were released a few times each year, while every few years, major new versions were released, such as GMT 3 (Wessel & Smith, 1995, 1998) and GMT 4 (2004, online announcement only). Most users became familiar with GMT in 1991 when version 2.4.1 was released and announced via an article in EOS (Wessel & Smith, 1991). ![]() At that time, the tools spread slowly as visiting scientists and graduating students took copies of the software with them on magnetic tape. GMT version 1 was first released informally in 1988 at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory while the founders Paul Wessel and Walter Smith were still in graduate school. ![]() GMT is also a prerequisite foundation for other high-level tools used by the scientific community, including MB-System (Caress & Chayes, 1996) for multibeam bathymetry and backscatter processing and GMTSAR (Sandwell et al., 2011) for interferometric radar processing. GMT is widely used in marine geology and geophysics (e.g., Müller et al., 2016), solid earth geophysics (e.g., Ritsema et al., 2011), geodesy (e.g., McClusky et al., 2000), geodynamics (e.g., Steinberger et al., 2004), oceanography (e.g., Key et al., 2004), and planetary sciences (e.g., Smith et al., 1999). GMT has been around for almost 30 years and it is embedded in many mission-critical workflows. Most users around the world (approximately two thirds) use GMT under Windows (and with Ubuntu bash for Windows 10 gaining traction, this fraction may increase) followed by macOS and Linux, whereas in the United States the dominant operating system for GMT users appears to be macOS. The Generic Mapping Tools (GMT) have many tens of thousands of users worldwide. Nonetheless, new users should take advantage of modern mode to make shorter scripts, quickly access commonly used global data sets, and take full advantage of the new tools to draw subplots, place insets, and create animations. With the latest GMT version 6, we solve this conundrum by introducing a new “modern mode” to complement the interface used in previous versions, which GMT 6 now calls “classic mode.” GMT 6 defaults to classic mode and thus is a recommended upgrade for all GMT 5 users. Reducing these pitfalls means changing the interface, which would break compatibility with thousands of existing scripts. The basic syntax of GMT scripts has evolved very slowly since the 1990s, despite the fact that GMT is generally perceived to have a steep learning curve with many pitfalls for beginners and experienced users alike. As a cross-platform tool producing high-quality maps and figures, it is used by tens of thousands of scientists around the world.
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