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Revision as of 22:55, 27 May 2015

95 bytes added ,  27 May 2015
→‎GUI: update to note that GUI has been released
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==Does Octave have a GUI?==
==Does Octave have a GUI?==
Yes! It was released with Octave 3.8.0 (Jan 1st, 2014) but is considered experimental. To start Octave with the GUI, use the {{Codeline|--force-gui}} option.
Yes! It was officially released with Octave 4.0.0 (May 27th, 2015).  It was
also available since version 3.8.0 has an experimental feature (use the
{{Codeline|--force-gui}} option to start Octave).


==When will the GUI stop being experimental?==
==Why did you create yet another GUI instead of making one that already exists better?==
The plan is for the GUI to be considered stable with version 4.0.
None of the GUIs for Octave that had been developed thus far were part of
Octave and there is a reason for it. All of them failed at a very important
point, integration with Octave. They treated Octave as a foreign black box
using pipes for communication. This approach is bound to fail with each new
version. Any fix made to make them work with a new Octave versions would only
be temporary. This included QtOctave (now abandoned and incompatible with
newer versions of Octave), Xoctave (which is proprietary and commercial), and
GUI Octave (which was proprietary and no longer available).


==Why are you working on yet another GUI instead of making one that already exists better?==
Quint was a project for an Octave GUI that actually tried to do it right.
None of the GUIs for Octave that have been developed thus far are part of Octave and there is a reason for it. All of them fail at a very important point, integration with Octave. They treat Octave as a foreign black box using pipes for communication, an approach that is bound to fail with each new version. Any fix made to make them work with new Octave versions would only be temporary. This included QtOctave (now abandoned and incompatible with newer versions of Octave), Xoctave (which is proprietary and commercial) and GUI Octave (which is proprietary).
Eventually it was merged into the Octave repository and is no longer a
separate project. Also, many bits from QtOctave were reused in the GUI.


QtOctave was great and very useful tool. It looked beautiful and we are thankful to its developers for working on such a nice tool plus making it libre. However, it would ''never'' be stable.
QtOctave was a great and very useful tool. It looked beautiful and we are
 
thankful to its developers for working on such a nice tool. However, it
Quint was a project for an Octave GUI that actually tried to do it right. Eventually it was merged into the Octave repository and is no longer a separate project. Also, many bits from QtOctave were reused in the GUI.
would have ''never'' been stable as it was. But most of all, the developers
made it free software so we could reuse large chunks of it which were
incorporated in what is now the Octave GUI.
Retrieved from "https://wiki.octave.org/Special:MobileDiff/6323"

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