Re: GUI work (was: Graphical help browser)

[John W. Eaton]

On 25-Nov-2008, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:

| Of course, these are very subjective reasons... but in the grand
| tradition of past holy wars like Emacs vs vim and Gnome vs KDE (of
| which this present jihad feels like an offshoot), subjectivity is all
| we have.

I would prefer that Octave be relatively toolkit agnostic since the
preferred toolkit seems to change over time.  It seems to me that it
would be bad to be too tightly coupled with a particular toolkit.

| Btw, why do we even *want* a terminal widget? That seems like a
| mistake and limitation of the Matlab GUI that we shouldn't copy.

It seems natural to me that if you are typing commands to an
interpreter, that the results appear interspersed with the commands
you type.  That way you know which commands produced which results.

| It
| just occurred to me that a worksheet interface would be much better
| (all text, no need to try to LaTeXify the output).

LaTeXify what output?  It would help me if you could explain more
clearly what you mean by "worksheet interface".

| While I sympathise a lot with jwe here, the whole point of the GUI is
| the aforementioned pretty pink bows and unicorns for Octave. Most
| users don't think that Emacs counts as pretty pink bows. They want a
| "simple" editor (which often has to do more than what "simple" usually
| means), and they don't want to learn Emacs-like keys.

Emacs can be a simple editor.  When you start a current Emacs on a
modern system with X11, you get familiar "File" "Edit" "Options"
... buttons, and you can start typing immediately to insert text.
Arrow keys move the cursor around.  That's all you need right?  I
think it is what most users expect these days when they type into a
text widget in a browser, no?  What more do you want or need?

jwe