2/27/18
I'm looking to resolve bug #53217 which actually turns out to be a question
of interface design.
Octave has a pager to display lengthy data that exceeds the size of one
Command Window. Traditionally, the CLI has been the only interface
available for Octave. In such an environment pagers are a necessity. With
a large matrix, and no pager, the data would fly by and would become
invisible and irretrievable once it scrolled past the top of the screen.
But when the interface is a GUI window, with scrollbars, the interface
design guidelines change. With a GUI the recommendation is not to use a
pager because the data is always available and there are convenient ways,
i.e., mouse and scrollbars, for retrieving it.
The question at hand is whether Octave should change the default status of
the pager to "off". Or possibly, whether we should change the default
based on whether the CLI or the GUI was invoked. For reference, the Matlab
default is to have the pager off.