Good day Richard,
Well, if that's the xmaxima that comes with the RPM I have, I'd rather
not. After working with if for a while, I figured out that it is not a
good enough GUI.
What I do is simple. I have a text editor. I type my commands in it.
Then I launch maxima, I type "load" or "batch" and I look at the result.
I then type "quit();" and I start over... very, very bad interface.
That's the best setup I could find.
I just can't use the console interface because I want to be able to save
my work in a convenient manner. What I do is rather lengthy. I have a
few files with typically 100 lines of maxima code or something... I
won't type this line by line every time I went to do some more work....
xmaxima doesn't help at all and seems to have serious problems of its
own. For example, I have "alt-p" which works... great!!!... but if I
want to do cut and paste the unix way, I go, select text and press the
middle button... then I'm in hell because the evaluation happens right
in the middle of the xmaxima screen and everything is garbled. If I try
the windows way, strangely enough, I only have cut and paste... but of
course, I want to have copy and paste... I don't want to destroy my
outputs or my inputs when I use the clipboard... Not to mention that it
seems to be leaving all sorts of dead processes behind...
It seems to me like people have worked really hard to design very
sophisticated solutions... but what I need is very simple. I want a
solution like gnuplot or python where you enter commands, can go back
with the arrows, can save your work and so on...
After learning to use the maxima engine, I've grown to love it. I'm
still convinced that Mathematica and Maple are more powerful, but Maxima
does just fine for what I need!
If only, I could have a decent interface!!!
It would seem like emacs is the best interface around... but how to get
it working???
Richard Fateman wrote:
> Can you use the packaged xmaxima from Schelter's
> web site?
> Especially if you don't care for emacs..
>
> I am sorry I can't help you with the GCL version
> of maxima.
> RJF
>
> Daniel Lemire wrote:
>
>>I'm trying to get the emacs maxima mode working. I've never used emacs
>>very much, I don't really care for it... the real solution to my itch
>>would be a "working" console maxima (with support for things like
>>backspace...).
>>
>>I have the latest RPM package for Maxima...
>>
>> [lemire@lagrange lemire]$ rpm -q maxima
>> maxima-5.6-1
>>
>> And what seems like a decent emacs...
>>
>> [lemire@lagrange lemire]$ rpm -q emacs
>> emacs-20.7-34
>>
>> I've edited my .emacs file adding the following lines...
>>
>> (autoload 'maxima-mode "maxima-mode" "Maxima editing mode" t)
>> (autoload 'maxima "maxima-mode" "Running Maxima interactively" t)
>>
>> Then, after launching emacs, M-x maxima or M-x maxima-mode gives me
>> "cannot open load file: maxima-mode".
>>
>> I tried various things like copying maxima-mode all over the place,
>> giving the full load path... basically, nothing works. I checked the
>> file permissions... and so on.
>>
>> I should point out that I was able to succesfully other .el modes for
>> emacs. I'm not totally stupid. I understand the process.
>>
>> I'm pretty sure emacs finds the files. Anyhow, it finds other .el files
>> without any problem.
>>
>> So what happens??? What are the requirements... ???
>>
>> Any chance anyone (not me) will ever fix the console app so that it
>> works like a standard console app (say, gnuplot....???) I got some
>>email from someone at some point (can't recall who) about a fix for the
>>console app...??? Whatever happened to this???
>>
>>--
>>Daniel Lemire, Ph.D.
>>http://www.ondelette.com/
>>
>>_______________________________________________
>>Maxima mailing list
>>Maxima@www.math.utexas.edu
>>http://www.math.utexas.edu/mailman/listinfo/maxima
>>
>
--
Daniel Lemire, Ph.D.
http://www.ondelette.com/