On Sun, 2010-04-11 at 21:29 +0100, Leo Butler wrote:
> I have a few suggestions for Xmaxima.
Very good; it is nice to see someone interested in Xmaxima.
> 1. In the File menu, add an option to 'Save Maxima Input'
> to disk;
>
> 2. In the File menu, change the option from 'Save Expressions'
> to 'Save Maxima State' and have the file chooser screen for *.lisp
> files. The present menu option is misleading, as it generates a
> lisp file to reproduce the current state of the Maxima session,
> and since it is a lisp file that is being saved, it is misleading
> to screen for *.bin files.
I agree with both. But for the command associated to 'Save Expressions'
I recommend to use the following:
sendMaxima $maxima_priv(cConsoleText) ":lisp-quiet (prog2 (mfuncall '\
$stringout \"$file\" '\$input) nil) \n"
That way, if the user is at (%i89) when he decides to save the input,
the prompt will not move to (%i90) and the stringout will not be saved
to the file.
While you are working on it, how about one more menu entry to load the
State from a previous session. It would be nice if it did a load
followed by a playback, to get the same session on the Window (both
commands should be called quitely as the stringout command above).
> I have attached patches to Menu.tcl and FileDlg.tcl to implement
> these changes. If these are ok, I'll patch the documentation, too.
In FileDlg.tcl, I'd change the order of .mc and .mac, since I think it
is more common to use .mac and not .mc as default extension.
> 3. In the Options menu, under Preferences, add an option to save
> the current directory on closing Xmaxima & restore it
> on start-up.
>
> After poking around, it's not clear to me how to implement 3...
It would require adding one more keyword to the Xmaxima state that is
saved in ~/.xmaximarc and when that keyword is read on start-up, the
value of maxima_tempdir should be changed (with another :lisp.quiet
command).
> I am writing a tutorial for my 1st year maths students on using
> Maxima, and in writing the introductory material on using Xmaxima,
> these features appeared to be both useful (expected) and missing.
Excellent, I'd like to see it when it's done.
Please go ahead and commit your changes.
Regards,
Jaime