In my use of xmaxima (in unix), I find it very useful to have the
"emacs key bindings".
At least up through v. 5.9.2 this was the case as well in Win-XP
(which is what most of my students use).
It would be very useful to have search and replace in the editor as
well.
The time and typing savings should be obvious. For instance, one
types in an algebraic or differential equation, and a number of other
lines. The stuff scrolls off the screen up perhaps several pages.
One wants to change parameters. So, one searches the preceding stuff
to find the place where the equation was defined, then edits that
equation, enters it, etc.
At present, what I do is evoke the external editor "xemacs" via the
"system" command, edit the file, save it, and reload it into maxima.
The simple function (with any argument at all)
EM(sys) := sys("xemacs &");
does this in Unix. HOW DOES ONE DO THIS IN WIN-XP?
One way to improve things is to implement various desired features in the
xmaxima editor. This can never satisfy all users since users will
typically prefer different editors, key-bindings, etc.
An alternate way would be to allow the user to specify an editor in the
xmaxima startup file.
For instance, the email program "pine" has the ability to set an
editor in the .pinerc file.
When one starts to edit an email message, it brings up that
editor. After editing, one saves the file and goes back to pine to
send it. As I indicated, the EM function above does this in xmaxima
in unix, so one doesn't really need the capability in unix (except
for the two step process of editing and loading, and the ability to
use the "dispfun" and related commands.
-sen
On Wed, 6 Sep 2006, Jaime E. Villate wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-09-05 at 09:40 -0400, sen1 at math.msu.edu wrote:
>> On the manual, how about an extra button in the xmaxima window under
>> "Help" which would allow the user to use firefox, iexplorer, etc to open the
>> manual? One button could say "browser manual" and the other could
>> say "html manual"
> yes, that would be easy to do and since we already have menu entries
> that open a external browser with some of the project's pages, it makes
> sense to have another entry for the manual.
> However, I will only do that change after the 5.10 release because it
> is a new feature and not a bug fix, and we don't want to delay 5.10
> any longer.
>
>> Also, would it be difficult to allow users to select their own editors
>> in the editor window. So, one could choose "notepad, word, emacs,
>> etc"
> I don't understand what you're talking about; I'm not aware of any use
> of an external editor. Can you explain what you do in Xmaxima to make it
> launch an external editor?
>
> On Wed, 2006-09-06 at 01:31 -0400, sen1 at math.msu.edu wrote:
>> Someone earlier said that
>> adding search or even line breaks to the function list in the xmaxima
>> browser was difficult.
> Those two things are not difficult to do, assuming that you are talking
> about a search in the current HTML page, as in Firefox.
>
> The second feature (line breaks in the function list) has already been done,
> because the modification was so trivial that I thought it would not add any
> entropy to the 5.10 release process. Adding a search feature will involve
> several lines of code, so I will include it in the list of features that
> I'll work on after 5.10 is released.
>
> Regards,
> Jaime Villate
>
>
--
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| Sheldon E. Newhouse | e-mail: sen1 at math.msu.edu |
| Mathematics Department | |
| Michigan State University | telephone: 517-355-9684 |
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