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:''See [[Differences between Octave and Matlab]]''. | :''See [[Differences between Octave and Matlab]]''. | ||
= | =GUI= | ||
This is a small section but it's probably one of the most frequent questions. | |||
==Does Octave have a GUI?== | ==Does Octave have a GUI?== | ||
Yes! It was officially released with Octave 4.0.0. It was | |||
also available since version 3.8.0 has an experimental feature (use the | |||
{{Codeline|--force-gui}} option to start Octave). | |||
==Why did you create yet another GUI instead of making one that already exists better?== | ==Why did you create yet another GUI instead of making one that already exists better?== | ||
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). | |||
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. | |||
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 | |||
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. | |||
=Graphics: backends and toolkits= | =Graphics: backends and toolkits= |