Tips: you must run close when using Octave in Emacs under MS-Windows

[Chris Zheng]

Dear list,

I use Octave in Emacs under MS Windows. With recent versions of Octave
(e.g. octave-4.2.2-w64.zip), all the plot commands do not work. That
is to say, if I run “plot(1:10)”, nothing happened and octave showed
me the prompt again. I struggled with this issue for some
time. Finally, I find the solution:

You must run “close” or “close all” before any plot commands.

When I was frustrated with the problem I searched the Internet and see
no clear answer. So I post my solution here in case it might be
helpful for Octave and Emacs users.

More details:

OS: MS Windows 8.1

Emacs version: 27.0.50 of 2018-03-26, the master branch

Configuration for Octave in Emacs:
(setq inferior-octave-program "C:/octave/bin/octave-gui.exe")
and put "C:\\octave\\bin;" before the old PATH.

Using empty .octaverc is useless. Adding “close” or “close all” to
.octaverc is useless.

Hope this helps,

Chris