Re: GUI work (was: Graphical help browser)

[Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso]

2008/11/25 John Swensen <address@hidden>:
> For my part, I would not be enthused about learning a new UI toolkit (e.g.
> QT).

Although I happen to be be at the stage where I'm just learning Qt,
and these are the benefits I see:

    1) Completely free and cross platform. I understand compiling Qt
    on Windows with MinGW is trivial, whereas GTK+ is more of a
    challenge, but correct me if I'm wrong.

    2) Highly themable and uses native widgets. I think that we don't
    really *need* a GUI to begin with; we're just trying to put pretty
    pink bows and unicorns on top of Octave in order to give our users
    warm fuzzy feelings, and I know native widgets are a big warm
    fuzzy feeling, especially for Mac users. I personally am also
    really happy with Qt now that I recently found it can also
    completely emulate GTK+ looks with a specialised theme[1].

    3) Nice tools to go with it (I rather like Qt Designer better than
    Glade).

    4) Big players prefer it, so I am guessing they have good reasons
    for it.

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'm lucky enough right now to just be in the very early learning
stages, so I can still be convinced to switch over to GTK+ or gtkmm,
and I have no code to lose for it (I know we all love our code; I love
mine too). So I'm still open to be convinced to something else. All I
will lose is some momentum and enthusiasm that I had been building up
over the past week or so over Qt.

> Once of the biggest plus sides of GTK for this application is the VTE
> terminal widget.

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
just occurred to me that a worksheet interface would be much better
(all text, no need to try to LaTeXify the output). The problem with a
worksheet interface is that I often want to output or browse through
gargantuan outputs, but that seems to be easily fixed: on the
worksheet interface, output fields by default are some maximum
(customisable size) and have a little button on them for expansion in
case you really want all the output right there.

> Either way, as you suggest, I am not going to duplicate effort by
> writing my own help browser.

I admit I had largely forgotten about OctaveDE. I'm glad to hear that
Soren's efforts will build into something else.

> Since I am fairly ignorant on the features of QtOctave, I would be
> interested to know what QtOctave has that OctaveDE doesn't have.

I've toyed very little with it recently, and it hasn't impressed
me... but I'm not impressed by GUIs in general. I hope that Pedro
Lucas will follow this thread and give you a better response.

2008/11/25 John W. Eaton <address@hidden>:
> On 25-Nov-2008, John Swensen wrote:
>
> | 4) Syntax-highlighting editor
>
> Can't you just use any editor?  Why must we write our own editor?  I
> for one would not want a built-in editor that sort of had Emacs-like
> keybindings.  I would want Emacs.

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. It probably is
best to use an existing editor, although our target users also like
monolithic packages, editor included. If John Swensen doesn't think
it's a huge task to write a simple editor, I say he can go for it, as
long as there's an option to use Emacs as well. ;-)

Also, building debugging into the editor is going to be important
too... If we use Emacs as the external editor, how are you going to
incorporate debugging between the GUI, Octave, and Emacs?

- Jordi G. H.

[1] http://labs.trolltech.com/page/Projects/Styles/GtkStyle