Re: GUI work (was: Graphical help browser)

[John Swensen]

On Nov 25, 2008, at 3:13 PM, John W. Eaton wrote:

> 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.

I think the current methods of adding a IDE on top of Octave does  
allow Octave proper to be toolkit-agnostic.  I am able to compile  
OctaveDE against any version of Octave >3.0 without any patches or  
modifications to Octave.  Even with the additions of the OpenGL  
renderer, it is still toolkit agnostic since pretty much any toolkit  
can set up a drawing context.  However, I think as time goes on there  
may be a few more changes to allow IDE's in general (e.g. the addition  
of the bp_table singleton for setting breakpoints programmatically and  
the ability to register multiple handlers for the readline idle event.

> 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

I tried the XEmbed feature of the new Emacs and it is awesome, but  
with a few drawbacks that will probably preclude its use in OctaveDE.   
1) You can only embed emacs in a widget that is permanently attached  
to the main window.  This means that the dockable widgets used in  
OctaveDE cannot be used as an embedder for Emacs vie XEmbed.  2) There  
would need to be an even more roundabout method for the editor  
interacting with Octave for tasks like debugging and executing code,  
as discussed in other parts of this thread. 3) XEmbed does not work  
for native version of OctaveDE for Windows and OSX.

John Swensen