It really depends on your time management. GMT classic mode is not going away so your scripts will still run in GMT 7 etc. And rewriting these to modern mode will be a learning experience that clearly will take some time, and in the end they will result in the same plots. And there may be setbacks when you run into a bug that requires us to fix it (which is good for all in the long run but can be frustrating if it is a hard bug to fix).
However, there are some benefits:
- In the long run, you will spend less time writing long GMT scripts since the modern ones are typically ~40+ % shorter.
- For animations you will leverage all the cores on your computer at no extra effort since gmt movie automates that and hides much of the complications of turning frames to MP4 or GIF.
- For the example above, which is not an animation, there is gmt batch which, like gmt movie, will automate the use of all your cores and you just need to write the modern mode script that creates one plot, with the variables coming from either a -T option (in your case maybe -T1982/2020/2) or a table with columns holding needed information per plot.
- Modern mode script are much closer to what the wrappers do, but not really, as @Joaquim will point out . However, this will change once we introduce longer options (keyword/values) for the command line (e.g.,
--region=w/e/s/n). Also, I do not think (but am not sure) if movie and batch are available in GMT.jl or PyGMT, yet. - So far, mostly the brave are trying out gmt movie and gmt batch. These can be made better if people try them and give constructive feedback.
Given you are looking for things to fill time for you, during the pandemic, I think this would be a useful investment for you, but that is your decision to make.
The GMT team is looking into offering user workshop online as we revise our tutorial material, but unlikely to happen until late Spring. I would like to give one on animation for users already familiar with GMT.