More on Octave under NTEmacs (to Francois du Plessis)

[Carlos Puig]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Francois du Plessis
> Sent: Tuesday, November 21, 2000 5:12 PM
> To: Internet
> Subject: address@hidden
>
> Hi
> Thank you for your reply.  I did do what you suggested.  The error
message
> is now gone, but when I do a "M-x run-octave", Emacs freezes over and
I
> need to use C-g to continue.  Do you have any other suggestions?  What
> should the mountings be and how do I know that Emacs actually see
Octave?

Ok, I remember something like this problem as well.    Here's something
else to try ...

In order for Octave to run as an inferior process  under emacs, it's
important to pass the switch "-i" as an argument to Octave when emacs
does the "exec."   This switch forces octave into interactive mode.  The
octave-mode emacs lisp files that came with my NTEmacs distribution have
the correct setup, but the octave-mode emacs lisp files that were
distributed with octave do not.

Check your octave mode setup as follows:

(1) Look in your emacs-20.7/lisp/progmodes directory to confirm that you
have octave-hlp.el, octave-inf.el, and octave-mod.el.   Look in the
emacs-20.7/site-lisp directory, etc  to make sure that you do *not* have
other copies of these files elsewhere in the emacs lisp search path.
If you installed octave-*.el files other than those that came with
emacs-20.7, I suggest you delete them now and keep the ones inside the
lisp/progmodes directory.

(2)  Inside your octave-inf.el, look for the following entry and verify
that the '("-i") is present on the top line.   If it's not, you might
try to change the entry to look like this:

(defcustom inferior-octave-startup-args '("-i")
  "*List of command line arguments for the inferior Octave process.
For example, for suppressing the startup message and using `traditional'
mode, set this to (ŠÜ"-qŠÜ" ŠÜ"--traditionalŠÜ")."
  :type '(repeat string)
  :group 'octave-inferior)

> I also don't quite understand how Octave is suppose to run from within
> Emacs - should it run within a buffer and appear like it is running
from
> within a Cygwin shell or do you use the command line at the bottom of
> Emacs?

Octave runs in its own buffer.   The behavior is very similar to what
you get with "M-x shell," except that its octave and not the shell
program.  The buffer name is "*Inferior Octave*".

Once you get it going, it works quite well.   (Warning: If you do
something that causes Octave to generate a lot of output -- thousands of
lines -- emacs will appear to "freeze" for a long time while it
processes the Octave output.  It's best to avoid such long printouts by
always remembering to use a semicolon.)

----

Please understand that we may have somewhat different setups, so.   I
installed NT emacs 20.7 first of all under Windows 98, and had it
running for months.    Then, I installed the full Cygwin 1.1
distribution.    Octave was last to be installed -- from my own
compilation from sources (cross-compiled under Linux for Cygwin) -- into
this Cygwin distribution.

If, as is likely, you followed a different installation path, your setup
may differ.

Wish this was easier for all of us ...

Carlos



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