Re: Successfully merged projects

[Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso]

On 11 April 2011 12:49, John W. Eaton <address@hidden> wrote:
> On 11-Apr-2011, John Swensen wrote:

> | The other option is to expect people to change their workflow to
> | accommodate the choice of editor (which you alluded to in your email
> | about turning Emacs into the IDE with friendlier keybindings). I am
> | against this options, but maybe I don't have a say ;)
>
> I'm not saying use Emacs as the GUI.
>
> I meant that people often say that Emacs is somehow hard to use.  I
> don't understand that, since if you start Emacs and start typing,
> characters appear in the text window.  How hard is that?  Arrow keys
> work for moving text around.  You can select regions with the mouse,
> etc.  Some of the keybindings are not familiar to people used to
> Windows editing commands, but those are configurable.  So I'm just
> saying that if you popped up Emacs with the right keybindings and
> window decoration, they would wouldn't have any problem using Emacs.

There are also lots of editors written for Qt apps. It's going to be
next to impossible to convince the uninitiated gentiles that Octave is
ok because you can use it with Emacs. The GUI, after all, is mostly
marketing. Maybe we can make it do nice things, but it certainly won't
do anything that is mission-critical that can't already be done with
Emacs (we should look into integrating the Octave debugger with GUD,
though). It's mostly eye candy to make people feel comfortable.

I think we should let people who use GUIs design them. If they think
they should create their own editor again, let them do it. Can the
QtOctave editor be ported into Quint?

You (jwe) or I, might go and patch their code later to give us a
button to run an Emacs process or attach to an existing Emacs server
to edit the code if we find the rest of the GUI useful, but they
obviously want an editor in the same window and written in Qt, so let
them have it. You and I already are comfortable with how Octave works
with Emacs. We're not the intended audience. Let the intended audience
have it their way.

- Jordi G. H.