Re: Woctave-another gui front end

[Stephen Montgomery-Smith]

On 12/04/2012 08:46 AM, vinukn wrote:
> Anyone know woctave? http://sourceforge.net/projects/woctave/ . I just found
> today. It look like guioctave,but opensource. It is a small one,written in
> wtl. 

I see there has been a lot of discussion about whether a GUI is desired
or not.  But let me add my point of view.

I teach a class "numerical linear algebra," and octave/matlab are
obviously the best programs for the students to use.  I use octave in a
unix environment, and I find the command line interface extremely easy
to use.  I combine a terminal window, an editor like gedit, and octave
running in the terminal window, and it works just great.

However, this is far harder to do in the windows environment.  Octave
creates an icon, and when you double click on it, it creates a terminal
window whose default directory is somewhere in the depths of an octave
directory.  One would like it to open in a default directory like the
users Documents directory, or at least in the directory it was in when
you last used it.

Then to edit the file, one uses notepad or writepad.  But how to
persuade these simple editors to save a file as an ".m" file?  Windows
tries to automate the file extensions, and as a result it becomes hard
to use the file extension ".m".  Furthermore, unix uses "line feed" as
end of line markers, and the notepad program seems completely unable to
handle this gracefully.  So programs copied from my website did not do
well.  Finally we figured out we should download another program called
"notepad++."  (I also found out how to change a windows setting, but I
honestly don't remember what it was.)  All of this took valuable time,
which should be spent understanding matrices, and understanding basic
matlab/octave commands.

If woctave provides a gui which simply provides two or three windows - a
window to run commands - a window to edit files - and a window to
display results, then this gui will have succeeded admirably.  And I
will definitely be introducing it to my students.  (And I don't need a
good "help" button, because "google" does extremely well.)

The reason octave needs a GUI is precisely this - the Windows OS does
not play friendly with non-GUI programs.

Stephen

P.S.  I just tried woctave.  One thing I couldn't figure out was how to
get it to display plots: e.g. plot(1:10,1:10) should display a straight
line.  So I am probably not going to use it until I get this issue resolved.