double TABs question / QtOctave

[John W. Eaton]

On 18-Sep-2008, Levente Torok wrote:

| Hi All,
| 
| 1) 
| I have a question with reading tab keys from clipboard.
| By copying double TABs from an external editor such as kwrite, the readline
| eats the first non-TAB (non-whitespace) character. I think this is 
interference with the
| pressing double TAB key which casues octave to display a question like:
| >
| Display all 3876 possibilities? (y or n)
| ---
| Does anybody know about this issue?
| ( I prefer using real TAB characters instead of spaces in place of TABs in my 
editor. )

That's the way that readline works.  It has no idea where the input is
coming from (cut and paste or your fingers on the keyboard or
something else).

| 2)
| I made  teste drive with kOctave, octave workshop and QtOctave.
| 
| Since the development of both kOctave and octave workshop has been stopped I 
suggest
| to focus on QtOctave which resolved many issue that kOctave couldn't.
| It has naturally some infant charateristics and rudimentary bugs but this is 
the one that has got 
| the closest to its matlab counterpart.
| Don't you think that this project should be pushed to a state where it can be 
octave's official GUI?

Has QtOctave changed so that interaction with Octave is at the Octave
prompt rather than through a one-line text entry box widget thing, so
that readline actually works properly and input/output is interspersed
as one would normally expect, in the terminal window where one types
input?

I've outlined several times on this list how I think a GUI for Octave
should be designed.  Search the lists for vte terminal.  For example,
look at this thread:

  http://www.nabble.com/wxOctave----to11113307.html#a11113888

which has links to two others, one containing some sample code that
shows how I think Octave should be embedded in a terminal widget.

What is really lacking at this point is thread safety for the Octave
interpreter, but that can be faked if you don't mind limiting calls
between Octave and the GUI to a few safe places.

jwe