When QGIS Qt6 builds received stable Python bindings in early 2024, I began the process of updating my plugins. Since Statist was the first QGIS plugin I have developed, it was the natural choice to start with it.
Although the porting was completed almost a year ago, I haven’t announced the new version for both personal and global reasons.
The switch to Qt6 was straightforward and mostly involved fixing imports and enums handling. However, this was also a great opportunity for refactoring, code cleanup, and UI polishing, which I could not pass up. So, I switched from a custom worker thread implementation to QgsTask, aligned the user interface with the native QGIS Statistical Summary panel, and improved the appearance of the frequency distribution plot when using a dark theme.
Statist. My first plugin for QGIS. That was a long time ago: 2009, QGIS 1.0.0, start of discussions about including fTools in the core (yes, fTools was a regular plugin that had to be installed manually), only a few third-party plugins, and almost no instructions on how to write Python plugins… And I was younger and didn’t know much (to be fair, I still have a lot to learn).
The last major update of the plugin was also in 2009: I was happy with the functionality, and there were no critical bugs. Later, as I gained knowledge and experience, I thought about refactoring several times, but it didn’t work out. And recently, something came over me, so I sat down and did it.
Users will probably not notice any difference, as there are not that many changes visible to them: only support for getting statistics on joined fields has been added. But there are many more changes under the hood:
the code to check for the presence of matplotlib has been rewritten
new signal-slot connection syntax is used
completely rewritten code for calculating statistics
unused and duplicate code was removed and classes were moved into separate files
system font is used for histogram labels
The plugin now lives in my repository, please report bugs and feature requests by mail or in the bugtracker (preferred).
I continue to work on the Statist plugin. It’s been a while since I updated the public repository — I’ve been working with my local copy. But today I uploaded a pretty big update.
Among the most notable changes:
ability to export frequency distribution histogram in PNG, PS, EPS, SVG and PDF formats
added toolbar with interactive plot navigation tools such as zoom and pan
the frequency distribution can be displayed as a histogram or a line graph.
ability to manually set range for both axes
improved and more polished UI
extended number of statistical values calculated by the plugin
fixed the issue with the broken plot resizing when changing the plugin window size.
There is only one major bug left (there are probably others, but they have not shown up yet) — in some cases, the histogram is displayed in a rather strange, I would say suboptimal, way. I have some ideas about how to fix this and will have to test them.
Enjoy the plugin. If you have any problems and/or feature requests, do not hesitate to email the author :-).
It is used to obtain statistical information on the specified field of the vector layer attribute table. Both numeric (integer, real, and date) and text (string) fields are supported. The plugin can work on the whole attribute table as well as on selected features. In addition to displaying basic statistical values, Statist also displays a frequency distribution histogram of the field values.
Statist plugin dialog
To use Statist, it is necessary to have matplotlib installed (it can be installed via OSGeo4W or downloaded from the project page, as it is used to display the frequency distribution histogram.
The plugin is available from my QGIS plugins repository. Comments, feature requests, and bug reports are welcome. It is best to post them in the bugtracker, but email is fine too.
If someone does not need a frequency distribution histogram and unnecessary dependencies, they can use the “Basic Statistics” tool from fTools (now included in core). After my patch, it has the same functionality as Statist except for the frequency distribution histogram.
