Re: New Octave for Windows sourceforge release

[Bill Denney]

On Wed, 29 Mar 2006, Doug Stewart wrote:

> Billings, Paul wrote:
>
> > My .octaverc has the following to configure interactions of my native 
> > editor with octave:
> > edit editor
> > '/cygdrive/c/progra~1/xemacs/XEmacs-21.4.13/i586-pc-win32/winclient.exe
> > `cygpath -msa %s`'
> >
> > Other editors may require -w instead of -m if they don't grok '/' as a dir
> > separator.  You can probably get away without the -s (short file names).
> >
> > I don't think ANY of this rigmarole should be in edit.m.  A note 
> > somewhere about this peculiarity of the cygwin version would be nice 
> > (e.g., the wiki), but I would think that's all.
>
> Are you saying we shouldn't make a version that works on windows????????

I think that he's trying to say that it should be documented, but it 
already does work in windows, you should read the documentation.  I'm 
somewhat inclined to agree.

The problem to me is that windows doesn't have a good editor by default 
(notepad definitely doesn't cut it for coding, and wordpad will try to get 
you to save the file as a non-text version).  Perhaps the best solution 
would be to have some decent relatively intuitive editor (which probably 
knocks out both emacs and vi) packaged with octave, and set the editor in 
the .octaverc of the package.

Since I see that the code works essentially as is (the spaces patch that I 
sent as far as I can tell fixes it), I think that the problem is more of a 
packager concern than an octave concern (it affects packages made for 
one-- admittedly widespread-- OS).

The solution should lie in the hands of the packager since it's relatively 
straightforward to just set the editor in a system-wide .octaverc file, 
and there's no good way to know the user's favorite editor in windows in 
another case (we could go into file associations, but I think that would 
be a bit complex of a solution).

Bill

--
"Never ask a hungry cat if it loves you for yourself alone."
  -- nancybuttons.com



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