Re: Octave User Interface

[Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso]

On 3 February 2010 22:10, John Swensen <address@hidden> wrote:
>I also enjoy having the command history so I can make a selection of
>previously executed commands and execute them as a block. Now, there
>may be a way of doing a lot of these things from the command line,

There is.

One thing that Emacs has taught me is that I don't really want to move
up three lines or forward five spaces. I want to move to the previous
paragraph, to the start of the function, the next closing brace. There
are functions for all that. And within a history, I don't really want
to go up three or four or however many history items. I want the
history item where I wrote a complex command to plot a 3d surface. So
I isearch backwards. C-r is the keychord in readline which Octave uses
in order to accomplish this.

I suppose there are some times where you really do want to have a
history on the left of your screen populated with trivial and useful
commands, but more often than not, the trivial commands are cruft and
take up screen space, and you at least remember part of the complex
command, which you can recall easily with C-r.

> Having worked on an IDE in the past (OctaveDE, and I hope to spend
> some more time on it when I finish my PhD), I can tell you that it
> is  a lot of work.

Yes, I know it's a lot of work. I'm sorry I never got around to
finishing the packaging. Now I'm confused, though. Looks like Rafael
got around to doing it, but I don't see the package in the archives.
Do you know what happened?

- Jordi G. H.