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Re: GUI vs. CLI


From: Quentin Spencer
Subject: Re: GUI vs. CLI
Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2006 23:56:17 -0600
User-agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0 (Windows/20041206)

Keith Goodman wrote:

On 3/15/06, Ron Crummett <address@hidden> wrote:
I'm sorry, I've been out of town for a couple of days and missed a lot
of the GUI vs. CLI discussion, so if I say anything irrelevant and old I
apologize.

My main question is what users mean when they say GUI?  It seems to me
like most everything done in either Matlab or Octave is done by command
line.  I like the window docking in Matlab - I like to set up Matlab so
that I have a panel featuring my command window, a panel with my editor,
and a panel for plots.  That way I don't have to go searching around
looking for any plots after I run a function.  But it's not too hard to
set up Octave so that the plot is in a small enough window that it
doesn't cover the command window, and my experience is that the command
window is inactive once you start editing a function (if I'm wrong on
this I'd love to know - when I type 'edit xxxx' then I can't do anything
in my command window until I close out of emacs).

This doesn't seem like a GUI to me, though.  Do people just want a print
button on plots?  Sure it would be nice but it's not too tough to use
the print command.  If I can do it, anyone can.  Anyway, my two cents...

From recent threads, many on the Octave list seem to think that the
Matlab GUI is just two 400x400 pixel print and edit buttons.

The Matlab GUI,  or IDE, has many useful features:

Debugging. Click on a line to set a break point. Watch the arrow move
when you step through your code. Move anywhere in the function stack
and the m-file will open with an arrow next to the appropriate line.
Mouse over variables to see size and/or values. When you debug with
the Matlab GUI you feel like you are interacting directly with the
code.

Set your path.

Evaluate highlighted code.

Highlight a function name in your code. Right-click to open that
function in the tabbed editor.

Auto indent highlighted code

Comment out a block of highlighted code.

I agree this would be useful. Aren't the general-purpose IDEs for Linux like KDevelop and Eclipse customizable so that you could make them do this for Octave? It seems like that would be the easiest path to a Matlab-like IDE--in fact I thought I remembered someone saying they were working on something like this for Eclipse a while back.

-Quentin



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