I need help with xmaxima, particularly on windows

"Barton Willis" <willisb@unk.edu> wrote
To: <maxima@www.ma.utexas.edu>
Sent: Sunday, February 22, 2004 10:22 PM

> What are the advantages to xmaxima over  running maxima on  a command line
> under
> Emacs or Xemacs?  I don't know of many (embedded plots, maybe).  If there
> isn't a way
> to stop an infinite loop under  Windows Emacs or Xemacs, that might be a
> show stopper
> for me.
>
> Xmaxima has plenty of problems right now under Windows --- I think
> to_lisp() doesn't work
> and sometimes prompts get displayed before the question.
>
> Unless somebody volunteers (real soon) that has the energy,  time, and
> ability to maintain
> xmaxima, we don't have much choice.  Do we?

Dear Barton,
Dear Colleagues,

Surely, there is no other choice! I agree! But on the other hand, there
may be Maxima users in Windows (like me) who know to use XMaxima,
but are not aware about the competitive possibilities of another
interface in Windows like Emacs or Xemacs. To be sincere, I have
never used Emacs neither do I know how to install it in Windows.

Moreover, XMaxima offers to me many commands (either standard
or added by me; XMaxima is easily expandable in its menus and
help with the insertion of the existing manuals in html and pdf!) and
I doubt whether these facilities are available in a command-line
interface. (Moreover, XMaxima is "international" by using the
appropriate encodings in TCL.)

Naturally, I agree that there are problems with XMaxima, but, in
any case, it can produce a reasonable way of preparing Maxima
notebooks (with the exception of embedded plots) in a more or
less easy way, moving inside them, saving them, recalling previous
commands, getting help, etc. I do not have the experience to say
if this is equivalent to a command-line interface.

>From what I have read so far I tend to give support to Valery's
recent suggestion about using TeXmacs in the future with Maxima.
Meanwhile, most probably, I will have to stay with XMaxima and
Maxima 5.9.0.

Yet, this discussion, as you correctly mention about the possible
choice, does not lead anywhere: there is no volunteer at all to help
with XMaxima in TCL now and the Maxima project cannot stop
because of the lack of a friendly Windows interface! I will wait
for TeXmacs in the future hoping it is not very slow and it can
separate output lines efficiently and automatically. I hope so!
(I have no experience with TeXmacs so far!)

Many sincere thanks for your comments and best regards from
Patras,

Nikos