Re: Successfully merged projects

[John Swensen]

On Apr 11, 2011, at 1:12 PM, John W. Eaton wrote:

> On 11-Apr-2011, John Swensen wrote:
> 
> | Were you indicating that you don't think an Octave IDE should have
> | an editor?
> 
> No, it should clearly be able to work with an editor.  But reinventing
> a new editor for every application makes no sense to me.
> 
> | the editor a part of the IDE.  People can open emacs alongside a
> | terminal (or the Octave IDE for that matter) if that is how they
> | prefer to operate, but it wouldn't be as integrated with the IDE.
> 
> Octave is a GNU project and Emacs is the GNU editor.  If any editor
> should be integrated with Octave, I think it should be Emacs.  At the
> very least, it should be possible for Emacs to work just as closely
> with the IDE as some other editor.
> 
> Why do you think this would be a difficult task?  What does the editor
> need to do to communicate with Octave?  Why can't Emacs be made to do
> that?  It seems to me that Emacs can be made to do just about
> anything, so I don't understand why this would be such a difficult
> task.


I think it will be next to impossible to embed Emacs in a QDockWidget.  This 
means that the editor component cannot be docked to the rest of the IDE.  This 
also means that if I can't arrange the editor and command terminal in the IDE 
the way I like, as shown at the following link 
http://imgur.com/3sFrS

I could place Emacs over the top of the IDE window, but then I have to keep 
switching back and forth between two different windows.  Even if we did devise 
some sort of interprocess communications between the IDE and Emacs, then when 
breakpoints are hit or an error occurs and you have it set to debug errors, you 
have to deal with focus issues for two different applications.  Like I said 
before, the IDE will probably not be used by advanced Octave users.

The other option is to expect people to change their workflow to accommodate 
the choice of editor (which you alluded to in your email about turning Emacs 
into the IDE with friendlier keybindings). I am against this options, but maybe 
I don't have a say ;)

John Swensen