Re: Separation into dock widgets

[John W. Eaton]

On 30-Apr-2011, Jacob Dawid wrote:

| Okay, maybe we should think about what our goals are. If you want
| 
| - windows that are dockable and an interface that is totally transformable
| - highest optimization in resources
| 
| then these are your primary goals and you should not bother with creating an
| IDE. Write a script that opens up a terminal window, your editor of choice and
| a browser for the docs and there you go.

Yes many of us (including nearly everyone who has ever worked on
Octave as a developer) are already comfortable working this way.
That's one of the reasons we don't have an IDE/GUI.  But there are
many competing goals for Octave.  Some people want a GUI.  Some people
just want to run thousands of copies of Octave on a cluster and want
an Octave that is not linked with GUI libraries at all.  That's why it
is important to have flexibility in the build process (a --without-gui
option for the configure script) and also the ability to disable the
GUI when Octave starts.  Similarly, not all users are going to have
the same ideas about what things need to be displayed in the GUI
(history, file system, workspace) or where the windows for those items
appear in relation to one another.  So again, it important to allow
users to configure these things as much as possible.

| Also, I suggest you look into
| calculations with the GPU as these are really important things that you can
| benefit from.

That would be fine, but the current toolkits to do that are not free
software as far as I know, so we can't use them with Octave.

jwe