Apologies for responding to several people at once. If you prefer separate emails per response, let me know and I'll break it up.
2008/11/25 John W. Eaton <address@hidden>:
> I would prefer that Octave be relatively toolkit agnostic since the > preferred toolkit seems to change over time. It seems to me that it > would be bad to be too tightly coupled with a particular toolkit.
I think we need an executive decision here. The past work that has been going on for the past several years with 7 or 8 or however many different aborted GUI attempts and we *still* don't have anything to
show to console-phobic users is a big problem. We'll have to make a choice and stick to it, and no choice is perfect, but there must be a least bad choice. :-(
> LaTeXify what output? It would help me if you could explain more
> clearly what you mean by "worksheet interface".
I mean something like what you get when you embed a Maxima session in TeXmacs... Now, hear me out, that also sounded like a stupid idea to me for Octave because I'm so used to the Octave prompt, but it could
make a lot of sense if it's properly executed. It would negate the need for a command history in a dockable window as in Matlab, since past commands are visible right there in the buffer, and you can intuitively scroll up to edit them... large output by default gets
truncated, so your worksheet doesn't overflow with garbage... copy-pasting with a mouse becomes more intuitive too. It seems like an overall better idea than just trying to put a terminal with helper windows like Matlab does.
> | While I sympathise a lot with jwe here, the whole point of the GUI is > | the aforementioned pretty pink bows and unicorns for Octave. Most > | users don't think that Emacs counts as pretty pink bows. They want a
> | "simple" editor (which often has to do more than what "simple" usually > | means), and they don't want to learn Emacs-like keys. > > Emacs can be a simple editor. When you start a current Emacs on a
> modern system with X11, you get familiar "File" "Edit" "Options" > ... buttons, and you can start typing immediately to insert text. > Arrow keys move the cursor around. That's all you need right?
Not quite. Unfortunately, it has become almost universal that C-x is "cut", C-c is "paste", C-z is "undo" and C-v is "paste". I am guessing that someone out there must have done a "non-GNU keybinding theme",
but I can't imagine how it could possibly work properly with Emacs.
That still leaves the problem of making three apps cooperate (GUI, Emacs, and Octave) when debugging instead of just two (GUI, Octave).
2008/11/25 Søren Hauberg <address@hidden>: > tir, 25 11 2008 kl. 13:58 -0600, skrev Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso: >> 1) Completely free and cross platform. I understand compiling Qt
>> on Windows with MinGW is trivial, whereas GTK+ is more of a >> challenge, but correct me if I'm wrong. > > I'm under the impression that gtk works easily with mingw, but I haven't
> used windows in a decade,
That's good to know. Like I said, I'm not intrinsically adverse to GTK+, if it works, great. I just want to choose something already so I can work with it too.
>> 3) Nice tools to go with it (I rather like Qt Designer better than
>> Glade). > > John, do you actually use such a tool in OctaveDE? I didn't for the help > browser, as it seems to be in the way for such a simple GUI.
As soon as you do anything significant, I would rather be able to
layout widgets visually than not. I would also look at your layouts visually instead of reading through your source code for anything significant sort of layouting.
>> 4) Big players prefer it, so I am guessing they have good reasons
>> for it. > > Really? I was under the impression that Qt is mostly used in embedded > applications. But hey, I don't really know...
Skype, Google Earth, those are two of the biggest I can think
of. Qutecom née Wengophone also uses Qt, but that's a much smaller app.
> Yay, we can a flame-war :-)
Well, let's keep it friendly. :-)
2008/11/25 David Grundberg <address@hidden>:
> I don't think Qt is a meta-toolkit, i.e. just because it has native > components/commands/widgets and you use this to create a GUI, the program > will still be a Qt program, and will not look like a native win32 or GTK+
> program.
I was under the impression that Skype and Google Earth looked native in each of their environments. Was I mistaken?
2008/11/25 John Swensen <address@hidden>:
> 3) I haven't used a UI designer since the days when I was first learning > Java. Because of the dockable widget I use for OctaveDE, I couldn't have > used the glade UI builder anyway.
Qt Designer has dockable widgets; it's overall a very nice design (but
I could be wrong about things; again, I'm still learning it).