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Re: GUI terminal widget


From: John W. Eaton
Subject: Re: GUI terminal widget
Date: Tue, 4 Jun 2019 17:18:23 -0400
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/60.6.1

On 6/4/19 12:06 PM, Rik wrote:
On 06/04/2019 02:35 AM, CROZIER Richard wrote:

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.

What does Matlab do for the pager inside the GUI? Does it run a separate process or provide a simple built-in pager in a GUI window?

I recall asking previously whether Matlab's terminal window provides a full terminal emulation when running on Windows or Linux systems, just to know what Matlab users might expect to be able to do and I think the answer was that it did not provide full emulation. Maybe someone could verify that with a current version? What happens if you try to execute something like

  system ('vi')

or

  system ('emacs -nw')

at the Matlab prompt?

Octave's current terminal window on Unix can run some programs like less or more, but not all. Emacs and vi don't work for me, for example.

Also, to properly run less on Unixy systems, we have to use that annoying wrapper program that forks, calls setsid to give up the controlling terminal (so less can access /dev/tty to get keyboard input, I think) and then execs the real Octave GUI program. That caused all sorts of trouble and wasted effort in the past. And it still makes debugging the GUI startup code much more difficult than it should be. It might have been simpler and saved a lot of time if, instead of writing that wrapper program to get less working properly, I had just known how to write a simpler unified terminal widget.

jwe




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