Re: GUI starts up with terminal

[Daniel J Sebald]

On 08/23/2012 04:22 PM, John W. Eaton wrote:
> I started looking at this.  It's not too hard to separate the command
> line option processing from the rest of the startup code, but that
> doesn't solve the whole problem.
>
> I'd like to be able to run Octave from a terminal as always, except
> that now it will start the GUI by default.  That should not be too
> hard to do.  However, we need to know when we can avoid starting the
> GUI, for example when there is a filename specified on the command
> line or when I/O is coming from a pipe or redirected from a file:
>
>   1. octave myfile.m
>   2. echo "x = 1" | octave
>   3. octave<  myfile.m
>
> Currently we do that by checking whether there are extra arguments
> after the options are processed (case 1 above) or by looking
> at whether stdin is a tty, by calling "isatty (fileno (stdin))" (cases
> 2 and 3 above).
>
> That can all still work when Octave is invoked from a terminal.  But
> if it is started from a "launcher" menu thing without a terminal, what
> happens then?  How can we detect that Octave was started that way?

I think those launcher things can have their "command" adjusted.  So it 
would be possible to define that launcher as "octave --use-gui", for 
example.

But going the other direction?  I'd kind of prefer to not have to start 
Octave from the command line without gui as

octave --no-gui

Please add an option in the settings file because I quite often use 
octave in a minimalist fashion.  If I'm working on something and quickly 
need to add a string of numbers or compute something I use octave like 
an advanced calculator because it starts quickly on my current system. 
The alternate is to use the mouse to look under "Applications", find the 
calculator (if it will suffice) and type away.  But "ten fingers beats 
one finger plus mouse" applies in the minimalist case.  Sure that 
applies to the GUI as well, but unless I'm in a big project frame of 
mind, the command line will do.


> If there is no way to distinguish between cases 2 and 3 above and
> starting Octave from a launcher with no terminal, then would it be
> acceptable to require that an option like --force-gui be used to tell
> Octave to launch the gui?

To me, that is preferred.  It used to be that one could define the 
command used by the OS GUI menu item (I forgot, what has been added to 
Octave is actually and IDE... IDE-O!  Bring your ideas to life... so 
--force-ide is what it should be) in those menus.  I imagine it is still 
done that way, but more behind the scenes.

Dan