So I wrote a proof-of-concept GUI for octave. As I mentioned before, I
intend to have a GUI/IDE with syntax highlighting and integrated
plotting, so it looks much like Matlab.
Well, I've got the basic window with a prompt (including readline-like
functionality) and a basic text editor (no syntax highlighting). It's
444 lines of code, and you can find it here:
http://www.math.mcgill.ca/loisel/octave-gui/ You'll need QT, probably
version 4 or 4.1, to get it going, but the advantage is that my code is
very simple!
I'm still missing the plotter, but I don't think that will be long
either. Once I've written a basic plotter as well, it's 90% done and
all that's left is the other 90%.
In principle, this code would compile in MinGW as well, but I gave up
on MinGW for the time being because I wanted to get a prototype working
and MinGW was getting in the way. I am looking forward to David's
imminent release of a MinGW octave.
Note that my code doesn't even need to be compiled as part of octave;
it links against the regular octave libraries without using the octave
source. So you don't need to build octave from source. You wouldn't
need to build QT4 from source either, except of course if you can't
find a QT4 rpm for your OS. I couldn't find one for CentOS 4.2 (or
RHEL4) so I spent yesterday night compiling QT4.
I will let you know once plotting works (tomorrow?)