RE: New Octave for Windows sourceforge release

[Billings, Paul]

Bill is correct -- I was saying that edit.m works "as-is" for me with proper
configuration of the EDITOR variable.  The fact that I have to set this
variable is clear from the edit.m help.

The fact that cygwin and windows-native paths are incompatible is not widely
known.  Actually, anyone that tries it will find out quickly enough.  It is
the solution that is not widely known.  The trick of using cygpath in the
editor command 1) needs to be documented, but 2) is windows specific -- and
therefore I don't feel it should go into the cross-platform documentation
(i.e., edit.m).

I appreciate the desire to work "out of the box", but as Bill points out,
the lack of a standard, capable, "intuitive" editor is limiting.  The
"right" way to handle this, IMHO, is for the packager to bundle a better
editor (e.g., SciTe) and make octave use it through the site .octaverc.  (Do
you now offer two versions of the install, with/without the editor?  I have
noticed from other threads that package size is a consideration.)

Secondly, documenting the cygpath trick will help users that get octave via
cygwin's install as well as any intrepid users that get octave via the
"bundled" install and want to use a different editor (although they will
have a working template for the EDITOR variable, so it's not a complete shot
in the dark).

Paul


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bill Denney [mailto:address@hidden
> Sent: Wednesday, March 29, 2006 5:02 PM
> To: Doug Stewart
> Cc: Billings, Paul; address@hidden
> Subject: Re: New Octave for Windows sourceforge release
>
>
> On Wed, 29 Mar 2006, Doug Stewart wrote:
>
> > Billings, Paul wrote:
> >
> >> My .octaverc has the following to configure interactions of my native
> >> editor with octave:
> >> edit editor
> >> '/cygdrive/c/progra~1/xemacs/XEmacs-21.4.13/i586-pc-win32/winclient.exe
> >> `cygpath -msa %s`'
> >>
> >> Other editors may require -w instead of -m if they don't grok
> '/' as a dir
> >> separator.  You can probably get away without the -s (short
> file names).
> >>
> >> I don't think ANY of this rigmarole should be in edit.m.  A note
> >> somewhere about this peculiarity of the cygwin version would be nice
> >> (e.g., the wiki), but I would think that's all.
> >
> > Are you saying we shouldn't make a version that works on windows????????
>
> I think that he's trying to say that it should be documented, but it
> already does work in windows, you should read the documentation.  I'm
> somewhat inclined to agree.
>
> The problem to me is that windows doesn't have a good editor by default
> (notepad definitely doesn't cut it for coding, and wordpad will
> try to get
> you to save the file as a non-text version).  Perhaps the best solution
> would be to have some decent relatively intuitive editor (which probably
> knocks out both emacs and vi) packaged with octave, and set the editor in
> the .octaverc of the package.
>
> Since I see that the code works essentially as is (the spaces
> patch that I
> sent as far as I can tell fixes it), I think that the problem is
> more of a
> packager concern than an octave concern (it affects packages made for
> one-- admittedly widespread-- OS).
>
> The solution should lie in the hands of the packager since it's
> relatively
> straightforward to just set the editor in a system-wide .octaverc file,
> and there's no good way to know the user's favorite editor in windows in
> another case (we could go into file associations, but I think that would
> be a bit complex of a solution).
>
> Bill
>
> --
> "Never ask a hungry cat if it loves you for yourself alone."
>    -- nancybuttons.com
>
>
>
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Octave is freely available under the terms of the GNU GPL.

Octave's home on the web:  http://www.octave.org
How to fund new projects:  http://www.octave.org/funding.html
Subscription information:  http://www.octave.org/archive.html
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