Re: GUI work (was: Graphical help browser)

[Søren Hauberg]

tor, 27 11 2008 kl. 13:07 -0600, skrev Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso:
> Also, what do you think of a worksheet interface instead of a command
> line? We can do better than copy the mostly useless Matlab GUI, right?
> (It's clearly mostly useless, or else we would have tried making an
> imitation GUI much earlier.)

Some time ago I did some experiments with an alternative GUI. The basic
motivation was to solve the "to page or not to page" problem, which can
described as follows: When you run a command that produces a lot of
output you can either:

  1) Print all the output directly to the prompt (this is what matlab
     does). You can get this behaviour in Octave by typing 'more off'.
     The problem with this approach is that sometimes you generate so
     much output that some of it is lost due a limit on the number of
     lines that a terminal remembers.

  2) Run the output through a pager (default in Octave). The problem
     is that once you quit the pager, you no longer have access to the
     output.

My solution was to print all the output in a separate sub-window (what's
that called?) the could be scrolled. This sub-window could then be
hidden, if you didn't want to see the output. The result was actually
fairly nice, but it required some intrusive changes to Octave, and it
meant that a lot of stuff (tab-completion, history searching, Ctrl-C
handling, ...) had to be re-implemented (I never did this). I put a
small video demonstrating the GUI up at 


http://hauberg.org/wiki/lib/exe/fetch.php?cache=cache&media=alternative_gui.txt

Due to security reasons I had to name the file '.txt' in the end. So, to
view this you need to download the file, and rename it to something that
ends with '.ogg' or '.ogv'.

The amount of work required to make such a GUI work really well is
substantial. I think it would be great, but as a start I recommend
taking John Swensen's approach, as that seems to be easier to
accomplish.

Soren