Why does CairoMakie.jl not display anything when running code copied from the official website?

Question

using CairoMakie
x = range(0, 10, length=100)
y = sin.(x)
lines(x, y)

This code is copied from the official makie website

It is supposed to plot a basic sin function and display it in a new window. The code executes without throwing an error and when run in the REPL prints out the following:

Scene (800px, 600px):
  18 Plots:
    ├ Combined{Makie.poly, Tuple{Vector{Vector{Point{2, Float32}}}}}
    ├ LineSegments{Tuple{Vector{Point{2, Float32}}}}
    ├ LineSegments{Tuple{Vector{Point{2, Float32}}}}
    ├ LineSegments{Tuple{Vector{Point{2, Float32}}}}
    ├ LineSegments{Tuple{Vector{Point{2, Float32}}}}
    ├ LineSegments{Tuple{Vector{Point{2, Float32}}}}
    ├ LineSegments{Tuple{Vector{Point{2, Float32}}}}
    ├ MakieCore.Text{Tuple{String}}
    ├ Lines{Tuple{Vector{Point{2, Float32}}}}
    ├ MakieCore.Text{Tuple{Vector{Tuple{AbstractString, Point{2, Float32}}}}}
    ├ LineSegments{Tuple{Vector{Point{2, Float32}}}}
    ├ LineSegments{Tuple{Vector{Point{2, Float32}}}}
    ├ MakieCore.Text{Tuple{String}}
    ├ Lines{Tuple{Vector{Point{2, Float32}}}}
    ├ MakieCore.Text{Tuple{Vector{Tuple{AbstractString, Point{2, Float32}}}}}
    ├ Lines{Tuple{Vector{Point{2, Float32}}}}
    ├ Lines{Tuple{Vector{Point{2, Float32}}}}
    └ MakieCore.Text{Tuple{String}}
  1 Child Scene:
    └ Scene (728px, 541px)

It does however not display anything. Neither when run in the REPL nor when run in a script. I am using a 2020 M1 Mac, MacOS Monterrey, Julia version 1.7

Why doesn't it show anything?

Answer 1

There is not a way to bring up a figure with CairoMakie from the REPL alone like Plots.jl can. From the CarioMakie tutorial:

To see the output of plotting commands when using CairoMakie, we recommend you either use an IDE which supports png or svg output, such as VSCode, Atom/Juno, Jupyter, Pluto, etc., or try using a viewer package such as ElectronDisplay.jl, or alternatively save your plots to files directly. The Julia REPL by itself does not have the ability to show plots.