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Re: Problems with QtOctave


From: Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso
Subject: Re: Problems with QtOctave
Date: Thu, 2 Sep 2010 15:21:40 -0500

2010/9/2 David Grundberg <address@hidden>:
> So one way to reach out would be to write an Eclipse plugin.  That way
> we could reach people that want some IDE.  Or Anjuta.  Or KDevelop.

Or Emacs. But that was called too "macho"?

> But I think we got to have a terminal emulator and true readline
> functionality.

Not necessarily... readline is fairly opaque and undiscoverable unless
you go out of your way to learn how to use it. I like it this way, but
people who are looking for something like QtOctave don't.

An alternative is to ditch the CLI interface altogether and to do
something more like a worksheet interface, like what some CASes do.
Say, for example, wxMaxima. Fundamentally, Maxima is a REPL like
Octave and its "native" interface is almost the same. On the other
hand, wxMaxima works like a worksheet, where instead of using readline
for digging through the history, you just visually scroll up and edit
whatever command is there.

On 2 September 2010 05:22, Laurent Hoeltgen <address@hidden>
wrote:
> Somebody on this Mailing list mentioned Cantor
> (http://edu.kde.org/cantor/) some time ago. I think it's an
> interesting approach to have a single frontend for different
> backends. Maybe it's worth to consider that one as well.

This looks exactly what I'm talking about. I tried it with R, and it
looks nice. Since it's Qt, it also fits very nice into my Gnome
environment, and presumably will also look nice on other systems. It
doesn't have an Octave backend, though. It also doesn't have the cruft
that other Matlab-interface clones have that people seem to like:

   1) A command list. The worksheet interface makes this mostly
     superfluous.

   2) A list of defined variables. For some reason, it looks like
      people are happy without this list for other mathematical
      programs.

   3) Its own editor for scripts. Other programs seem to rely less on
      scripts than Octave, so perhaps that's why people want it less?
      I'm surprised that people would be satisfied using R this way,
      though.

   4) A filesystem browser. Related to above, because you'll have many
      scripts you'd want to edit.

People might be happy without this and with a worksheet interface
instead, if it works for R. Or they may want the actual Matlab
interface doppelgänger, which I think so far QtOctave mimics best (I
haven't gotten around to seeing how OctaveDE has progressed).

I wish we had some sort of actual data of what people want, because I
don't want any of this myself, but I want to please people who are put
off by white text command prompt on a black background. Inverting the
colours seems to help, actually, because people don't associate them
in that case with "something's wrong".

- Jordi G. H.



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