Re: Qt terminal

[Ethan M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

On Sunday, 08 January 2012, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
> My only remaining question that is pretty relevant for the user
> experience: How can I convince the cursor to stay in terminal (text
> mode) after entering some plotting command (and optionally still make
> the plotting window pop in front of the screen)?
 
> If I load "all.dem", I have to keep switching back to terminal to be
> able to hit enter to continue after a pause. In X11 that is not
> necessary (but I don't know how gnuplot with X11 works on Linux).

I do not have this problem with the qt terminal under linux, but to
the best of my knowledge this is because of the setting "do not steal
focus" in the window manager. I have no idea how you set the 
equivalent on OSX.  The converse problem - sending the focus back to
the terminal while you are trying to work with the plot window -
is equally annoying but can be disabled by  ./configure --disable-raise-console.
 
> - Plot size for qt is 640x480, for x11 it is 640x463, for wxt it is
> 640x402, but default font size in Qt is some 20-30 % smaller than in
> x11, and x11 also contains coordinates in lower left corner;
> consequently plot size in qt is 593x456, while for x11 it is 584x415
> (didn't measure for wxt); bottomline: in Qt the window looks somewhat
> too high. Would it be possible to make it smaller in y direction?
> (Optimally the same size as wxt, but it doesn't have to be that
> strict.)

Yeah, I also would prefer a different default aspect ratio.
But there is plenty of precedent for 640x480 being the default size.
That's what all of the bitmap terminals [use to] have.

Maybe we could make it a user-settable preference in the tool widget.
The wxt terminal maintains a preference file ~/.gnuplot-wxt so that the
widget settings are persistent.  I suppose the qt terminal could do the same.
 
> - I'm able to set arbitrary background color and it is remembered.
> However I cannot change plot size, font size somewhere in settings and
> ask gnuplot/qt to remember that. That would be much more useful for me
> than background color. (Yes, I know that I can always use "set term qt
> <whatever> to do that, but that's not the point.")

See above.

> - Feature request (not sure about it): I really like menu-based
> commands in windows. So even newbies are able to figure out some
> commands without having to read help. Do others think that this would
> make sense in Qt terminal?

Ugh, no.

> - Bug report: clipping part of plot with mouse in backwards direction
> (starting at some point and then moving up and/or left) is buggy. It
> works (clips properly), but displays in a weird way and leaves some
> weird traces.

Hmm. You are right.
I don't remember this being a problem before. 
Could it have been broken by a recent change?

> - I would expect the files (see list on the bottom***) to end up under
> src/qtterminal or some under src/qtterminal/trans and not under src,
> but that is just cosmetics. That way it is also easier to list them in
> .cvsignore (I don't use cvs and I don't know any tool to translate
> .cvsignore into .gitignore automatically, so that doesn't affect me
> directly).

I suggest to you that this is an example of why it is better not to
configure + build on top of your primary source directory.  I realize that
different people have different work-flows, but messing up the contents
of the directory tree you are using for source control strikes me as
a poor choice.  Perhaps you could use "make clean" or even 
"make distclean" before trying to commit any changes?


	Ethan