Octave/GUI tests

[Michael Goffioul]

Hi Jacob,

Today I tested the current version of the GUI. I must say that it improved a lot in the last few days. Good job. Here are list of issues I noted during these simple tests. What I find the most annoying for me is the terminal widget not behaving properly.

- terminal widget not behaving correctly; after start-up, I see "undecodable token: \001b(hex)[?1034h" appearing; it seems that the terminal size is not adapted properly in the pty, this is especially visible when starting "system('vim')"

- probably related to the previous one, pager doesn't work properly; I start the GUI with "./bin/octave-gui" in a terminal; at octave prompte, when using the pager, I can't control it from the octave terminal widget, I have to type my commands in the terminal where I started the GUI

- editor window is now a dockable widget, that's fine; but now we're hit by one of the limitation of the Qt docking system: dockable windows are always on top of the main window, even when the docked window is floating; whether or not this is good, it's a matter of taste, but personally I don't like it; that's the main reason that made me think we'd need our own version of dockable windows instead of using the Qt one (when I played with it a few months ago)

- folding only appears when content is indented; for instance folding does not appear when typing the following (but does appear if you indent the line "y = 2*x;"):

function y = fun (x)

y = 2*x;

endfunction

- closing the editor window just hides it; it's probably a matter of taste, but it sounded not intuitive to me; it didn't ask me for saving my current modified file; after closing the window, then clicking on "New File", just made the editor window to reappear with a new unnamed tab; so using the sequence new-file/close-window/new-file/close-window/new-file, you end up with the 3 unnamed tabs in the editor window

- no icons in non KDE/Gnome environment (I'm using LXDE); I think it's because of the use QIcon::fromTheme() without any fallback; note that fromTheme is only useful on Linux platform, it's meaningless on Windows (not sure about Mac OS X). It's also strange that icons are actually appearing in the editor window; this makes me suspect that it's using its own set of icons, but then it also means that for instance undo/redo icons in the main toolbar don't like the same as in the editor toolbar (as I don't have any icons in the main toolbar, I can't check, but I suspect it's the case)

- I wanted to test the variable browser, so I typed "demo plotyy" to see the variables at the various steps of the demo (it stops twice); however some variables are long strings with newline characters in it, making the variable browser not looking very nice; maybe strings should get truncated with an ellipsis and newline characters should be printed as \n instead?

- the current directory doesn't seem to be in sync; I typed a few "cd" commands, but the current directory displayed didn't change

- using the "exit" menu item while a gnuplot window is opened leads to a segfault

Michael.