Comfortable Octave usage on Windows

[Bart Vandewoestyne]

Hello list,

I've been an octave user for quite some years now.  For my
editing, i work on Linux with vi and simply run octave from a
terminal.  I now recently switched from university.  At my new
job, i have advised my collegues to use Octave instead of Matlab
for their number-crunching... just to get rid of all the license
problems and costs that they have.

Now... slowly... some of them are trying out Octave on Windows.
However, for now, they are not convinced yet... mostly because they
are not as geekish as I am and they prefer GUI's instead of
command-line interface.

So my question is... is it possible to setup a nice
GUI-environment for Octave on Windows without too much geekish
installation effort?  I cannot expect my collegues to be skilled
linux-command-line-experts.  Their knowledge of Linux and command
line is very very limited (ls, cd, ... and that's it...)  From
what my collegues told me, the things they were missing the most
are the following (in order of importance):

* GUI with easy adding of new files, changing path, ...
* Run scripts by pressing a 'Run' button... (i know, some people
  like this ;-)
* Interactive editing of figures (colors, axes, ...)
* Interactive debugging (step into, etc...)

Does there exist a GUI/IDE for Octave on Windows that is similar
in functionality to Matlab?  If not, what is a typical good
text-editor that is being used on Windows in combination with
Octave?

Please help me in convincing my collegues! :-)

Kind regards,
Bart

-- 
        "Share what you know.  Learn what you don't."