Re: How to launch Octave with its GUI ?

[John Swensen]

Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:
> Moving this discussion to the dev list...
>
> On 30/07/07, John W. Eaton <address@hidden> wrote:
>   
> > On 30-Jul-2007, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:
> >
> > | QtOctave looks like a really promising GUI, now that Octave
> > | Workshop is seemingly abandoned (and it was Windows-only, blah).
> >
> > I just installed it from the Debian package,
> >     
>
> Woohoo. :-)
>
>   
> > and although it puts up a window showing the Octave prompt and
> > output, it seems to interact with Octave by gathering input in a
> > text box and then sending it to an Octave subprocess.  So you are
> > not really typing at the Octave prompt, and Octave's readline and
> > history mechanism is not working.  Is that correct?
> >     
>
> Oy. I only very briefly actually used it. I spent more time fighting
> its build process to make it work with Debian, but yes. It looks like
> you're entirely correct. I hadn't noticed this. Drawback indeed.
>
>   
> > Instead, I think the GUI needs to have Octave running in a way that
> > will allow the command editing and history to work normally.  I
> > posted about this before, and provided some example code showing how
> > this can be done with gtk on systems that have pthreads:
> >
> >   http://www.cae.wisc.edu/pipermail/octave-maintainers/2007-June/003280.html
> >     
>
> I see... I read your comments. Looks like a complicated issue.
>
>   
> > Is there nothing similar for Qt?
> >     
>
> I'm sure there is. I'm just learning Qt right now. :-)
>
> Matter of fact, I had a question about this in general, interacting
> with Octave. I'm thinking about getting a proper debugger for Octave
> scripts. Are pthreads the way to interact with Octave? I have no idea
> what they are, or if there's a better method.
>
> - Jordi G. H.
>
>
>   
See my patch from 
http://www.nabble.com/Proposed-patch-for-threadsafe-access-to-octave-internal-data-tf4080964.html
No one ever commented on it, so for the time being I am just going to 
put it in my program and register for the octave_rl_event_hook() 
callback to determine when octave is idle at the prompt.  Although the 
debugging portion of the octave_server class is not implemented yet, the 
function prototypes for interaction between octave debugging internals 
and an outside user of the octave_server class are in place.

John Swensen