Re: GUI terminal widget

[Rik]

On 06/04/2019 02:35 AM, CROZIER Richard wrote:
>
>> jwe,
>>
>> I didn't see any comments at https://wiki.octave.org/GUI_terminal_widget
>> so I thought I would bring the conversation back to the mailing list.
>>
>>  From a strategic level, this is a big change.  What do we get from
>> doing this (pros) and what do we lose (cons)?  Are there sufficient
>> benefits to undertake this task?
>>
>> Although the terminal often causes problems, it also allows for a lot of
>> code re-use.  We use Readline for history and input processing.  We get
>> 'less' and other utilities for free.  In replacing this, do we
>> essentially need to re-invent the wheel? That's a *lot* of coding effort
>> for something that isn't even particularly Octave related.  Since your
>> time is finite, if you are working on this then there will be other
>> Octave bugs that aren't addressed.  Is the balance worthwhile?  You
>> understand core Octave better than anyone so it may be that your time is
>> better spent resolving 50 bugs there, rather than writing more generic
>> terminal emulation code that other programmers could do.
>>
>> Just some ideas on what to answer before going forward.
>>
>> --Rik
>>
>
> The terminal code in Octave is a mess, I have gone in to try and fix
> bugs, but it is so complex (for example there is, or at least was,
> completely different terminal code for Windows and Linux), that fixing
> simple bugs had a huge overhead in understanding the terminal code.
Yeah, it is bad.  But are we leaping out of the frying pan and in to the
fire?  I.e., it might take a long time to change over to a new way of doing
things, and then we discover that there are other things, like threading,
which make it even more painful then supporting the terminal.
>
> Given that no-one has done anything to improve this for a long time
> perhaps JWE's help is needed to get the terminal to a state where others
> can help pick things up, especially if he has done some of the work already.
>
> I also get the impression he's enjoying getting this working. Enjoyment
> is important for a project maintainer!
That's fair enough, and it should be entered in the "pro" column if true.
>
> Incidentally, do you really need a pager in the gui? You have scrollbars
> on the windows. All you really need is a keyboard shortcut to scroll up
> don't you? Like SHIFT+PageUp
We would need it if we wanted to maintain compatibility with Matlab.  But
you're right that pagers are much less necessary when the data that scrolls
off the screen is not gone forever.

--Rik

>
> I also wonder if there is a lot which can be lifted/translated from the
> Jupyter Qt console:
>
> https://github.com/jupyter/qtconsole
>
> It has a history and a pager.
>
> Regards,
>
> Richard
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