I wanted to get a small survey of how people feel the GUI/IDE should behave with regard to the
gnuplot terminal which includes Qt support in its latest version. Mike submitted an addendum to a
small patch that attempts to use gnuplot "qt" terminal by setting environment variable
GNUTERM and falls back on the default if the version of gnuplot doesn't have "qt" support:
http://savannah.gnu.org/patch/?7847
If the latter happens then a message from gnuplot:
Unknown or ambiguous terminal name 'qt'
appears on the screen. Mike is proposing that if the user has GNUTERM variable
already defined in their environment, then that should take precedent.
I'll give my feelings on this, but I'm open to any behavior.
Definitions:
console -- the system console that octave/GUIDE+O is launched from
terminal window -- the window in the GUIDE+O having the redirected octave output
First, I think the preference is going to be that GUIDE+O use Qt terminal. It
is a nice looking terminal using the Qt icons giving it a look and feel that
match GUIDE+O. It has a couple more features than X11 terminal and is more
robust in terms of aliasing, alpha-scaling, print buttons, etc. It will be
ostensibly the same figure window on all three (four?) major platforms. There
is the option to customize a figure window and place just the plot within the
figure window (i.e., forward looking).
Given that, I felt that having the gnuplot warning
Unknown or ambiguous terminal name 'qt'
appear, which may be annoying but only happens at the start of launching
GUIDE+O, is tolerable and in fact maybe a good thing because it might capture
someone's attention and nudge them in the direction of realizing that there
could be a Qt figure window.
So, should the environment variable GNUTERM defined before launching GUIDE+O take
precedence over GUIDE+O defining GNUTERM to be qt (i.e., Mike's proposal)? I'm fine with
that, I guess. Probably those users who even know the mechanism of GNUTERM will be savvy
enough to know there is now Qt support in gnuplot. But that does mean someone can't
define GNUTERM for their octave-cli and get "qt" figures for octave/GUIDE+O
unless they perhaps come up with a small shell script that pre-sets GNUTERM before
launching octave/GUIDE+O. (There's no sense in adding sophistication to Octave beyond
the current setup.)