I need help with xmaxima, particularly on windows

James Amundson ÐÉÛÅÔ:
> The biggest obstacle to releasing maxima 5.9.1 is xmaxima. In 5.9.0,
> maxima and xmaxima were significantly intertwined. I have now modified
> maxima so that xmaxima can interface to it in a significantly simpler
> way, but I am having trouble working out the kinks on the xmaxima side,
> particularly on windows. I really don't know how to debug a Tcl
> application on windows. If I continue working on the problem at the rate
> I am currently working, I think we can expect 5.9.1 in about 2020.
> 
> One option at this point is to simply dump xmaxima. In 5.9.0 xmaxima was
> the only real way to get a working maxima on windows. Now, however, we
> have a command-line version of maxima that is independent of any
> unix-emulation utilities. Although I would like to see us have a decent
> GUI frontend for maxima in the future, I think the command-line
> application is the best thing we have right now.
> 
> If there is some love for xmaxima out there, now would be the time to
> say so.
> 
> --Jim
> 

I take it for granted that Maxima Windows distributive
must be single self installing all-included executable.
This narrows down our present possibilities with respect
to Maxima shell on Windows.

1. TeXmacs

TeXmacs is nice and quite promising Maxima shell but
IMHO it is not ready for prime time yet - especially
on Windows.  I tried it in this environment and my
experience is not quite satisfactory. In principle it
works but:

a. It heavily relies on cygwin and on cygwin X-Windows port.
We can't package all these stuff with Maxima.

b. It's slow. TeXmacs isn't very fast on Linux but
on Windows/Cygwin I found it painfully slow - I don't
know why.

So at present TeXmacs is not a viable Maxima GUI
on Windows IMHO.

2. Emacs

I understand all merits of this great software but
it is not quite of Windows style.  I know that many
people in Windows realm don't like it.

And once again - can we package it with Maxima?
I'm not 100% sure that we can do it.

3. Xmaxima

It seems to me that at present on Windows it is the only
really viable Maxima frontend. It is light-wight and
quite of Windows look and feel.
After all it is not so bad in general. Personally
I like lower part of xmaxima window which can be
used for browsing documentation and Maxima program
debugging. Certainly, documentation and debugging
is available on emacs as well but not in the way
habitual for average Windows user.

If nobody else volunteer I'm going to help James
to fix it at least for forthcoming release.
I'm everyday Windows user but I know virtually
nothing about Tcl/Tk.

Best wishes,

Vadim


PS:
AFIK ghostscript can be packaged with Maxima.
Octave does this

-- 
      Vadim V. Zhytnikov

       <vvzhy@mail.ru>
      <vvzhy@netorn.ru>