Re: Successfully merged projects

[John W. Eaton]

On 11-Apr-2011, Richard Crozier wrote:

| I think you are certainly implying that emacs has all the functionality that
| anyone might require from a proposed GUI?

It has a lot of functionality.  It can be made to do just about
anything.  But the appearance is not likely to appeal to people who
are used to Windows GUIs.

| Or alternatively, that all that is
| desireable is the abilities you then specify, in which case surely pico
| would suffice.

No, I want my editor to be much more than a box where I can type some
simple text.  I was trying to make the point that Emacs can be that
simple.  It is not like it makes it particularly difficult to do what
pico can do using Emacs.  So my point was that I don't understand why
people seem to be afraid of using Emacs just because it can do a lot
of things.  It can also be used as a very simple text editor.  It's
not like it forces you to use all the features just because they are
there.

| Can you really highlight some text or select it or whatever happens in emacs
| and have that text sent to a running octave process as a command and view
| the output?

Yes.

| It's not obvious from the 'Using-Octave-Mode' page in the manual
| that this is possible.

Start Emacs and type

  M-x octave-mode

Then type some Octave commands.  Select a region.  I'd do this by
moving to the beginning of the region and typing C-SPC, then moving to
the end of the region, but you can probably do it with the mouse too.
Then type

  M-x octave-send-region

Emacs should split the frame into two windows and give you an Octave
session in one and the commands you are typing in the other.

The command octave-send-region is bound to C-c TAB C-r, which I know
seems odd, but that can be customized.  I'm also not the one who came
up with these default keybindings, so I'm certainly not claiming they
are ideal.  But they might match commands from other programming
language interaction modes in Emacs, I don't know.

| If you really can do all these things, perhaps all that is really required
| here is a better tutorial for using Octave in emacs rather than a GUI, and I
| am not being sarcastic here. 

It would probably be good to have a better tutorial anyway, but I
think that most users who come to Octave and think it sucks because it
doesn't open up a window with the familiar File Edit and About buttons
would not be too excited to hear that we had solved the GUI issue by
giving them Octave running in an Emacs Window.  It could have all the
functionality of OctaveDE/Quint and maybe more, but it would not be
the interface that they expect, so I'm pretty sure they would not like
it.

jwe