interactive terminal (was: Re: lua help build, autotools update)

[Karl R. <ra...@un...>]

On 16.11.2014 18:20, Daniel J Sebald wrote:
> * An interactive terminal?  That's been attempted (but not gotten very 
> far) going back twenty years.  I've never been real motivated on this 
> one because it doesn't fit my method of working with data.  I prefer to 
> do plotting as commands, not sculpture.

The idea has some attraction, although I positively hate "sculpting"
data into plots with programs like Origin or Excel. I´m not sure
what exactly you mean by "interactive terminal", so i´ll go
speculate a bit.

Suppose i have an initial plot in the interactive terminal. Now i´d
love to be able to

* click a button labeled "add title", and get a dialog window that
says "set title" followed by an input line where i can enter
whatever would come after the keyword on the console. There is an
"OK" button which silently executes the command, possibly a second
button that automatically says "replot" afterwards.

* said dialog window has a few additional buttons which fill in or
remove further "title" options to/from the input line, and i can
re-open it any time.

* whenever i right-click into the plot, i get a menu that says "set
label", "set arrow", plus whatever fits at the location.

* e.g. when the cursor is on the legend, i can change the "set key"
options, or on an individual key, i get to change the plot colour,
linewidth, key text, ...

* clicking on the axis labels lets me change the text, etc.

* possibility to drag the legend to another position where it
doesn´t collide with my data.

* upon editing labels, there is a dropdown list of available fonts,
and possibly one that inserts symbols as utf-8 characters.

* a "set grid" button (oh wait, wxt already has that ;-) )

....

This would help immensely in optically tuning plots, while still all
the versatility of old-school gp-scripting is retained.

Such an interactive terminal could then (later) also allow adding
further plots , changing the "using" statement, plot style, etc., to
the point where it becomes an "Origin" clone, only one that is
easily script- and programmable. Inline @heredata could be imported,
sorted, edited in additional spreadsheet windows, without ever
breaking backward compatibility.

Looking a few years into the future,

  Karl


P.S. It should optionally be possible to strip the saved script from
all settings that were not changed from the default/not used in the
present plot, so it can easily be edited and re-used. (That´d be a
cool feature also without an interactive terminal.)