Re: Successfully merged projects

[John Swensen]

On Apr 9, 2011, at 5:49 PM, Michael Goffioul wrote:

> On Sat, Apr 9, 2011 at 9:32 AM, Jacob Dawid <address@hidden> wrote:
>> Hello everybody,
>> 
>> today I finished merging both John Swensens and my work together. I update
>> my sources for qtermwidget from John and integrated his code in my terminal
>> window. Additional changes have to be made to open more than one terminal at
>> the same time, since the terminal still relies on globally defined C-style
>> functions and opening more than one terminal causes a mess, so there needs
>> to be some work done here. I attached a screenshot of the terminal, with a
>> history list being updated from octave directly via John's code.
> 
> To be honest, I don't think you need to support multiple octave session, and I
> don't think this is technically do-able when running octave sessions in 
> threads,
> as opposed to running them in separate processes (octave is not thread-safe
> and stdin/stdout are not thread-specific).
> 
> Michael.

I guess I kindof agree.  I think having an MDI interface, particularly with 
multiple instances of Octave running, will be confusing to new users who expect 
it to be similar in kind to the Matlab interface.  Of all the students and 
researchers I know who use Matlab and Octave, I can only think of one or two 
instances where they ran simultaneous Matlab processes and this was on some 
simulations that couldn't be parallelized easily and they wanted to run 16 
simulations simultaneous on a 16 processor machine.

I actually am a fan of the dock interface, as it is flexible enough to allow 
the user to arrange the UI however they like.  I do see a lot of variability in 
how users arrange their Matlab UI.  Some like the help browser docked, some 
like it floating.  Some like to have a certain plot number docked and the rest 
floating.  Some like to hide history or the file browser.  I suppose it is 
possible to do many of the same things with the MDI interface and save the 
configuration for subsequent loads.  The QT dock interface allows you to do 
this by saving the geometry and state of the main window widget.  Does it work 
the same for the QT MDI interface.  You had mentioned that you have to deal 
with the QT dock center widget carefully.  Can you elaborate?

John