Re: unexpected "replot" in "pause mouse"

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

On Sunday 02 May 2004 08:10 am, Petr Mikulik wrote:
> The reason is in mouse.c:
>
>  /* Terminate via replot if we are in 'pause mouse' */
>  /* FIXME EAM: untested for mouse devices other than X11 */
>  if (paused_for_mouse) {
>     paused_for_mouse = FALSE;
>     do_string("replot");
>     fputc('\n', stderr);
>  }
>
> It works fine with the "replot" being removed;

You probably remember that there were many, many problems
with replot and mouse clicks over the last year.  The line you are
complaining about was added to fix some of these problems.
I don't claim that the fix is perfect, but removing it will re-introduce
other bad behaviour.

> however, under X11:
> 	gnuplot> pause mouse
>   does not return to the prompt "gnuplot> " afterwards

Yeah.  Exactly. And that's not the only consequence.

> - In Octave, I have to write
> 	graw('pause mouse\n\n');
>   instead of
> 	graw('pause mouse\n');
>   otherwise first character from the next command is eaten.

Now that is a real problem, which I thought had been fixed.
Is this before or after you removed the replot command?

> The "replot" should go away, as it is an unexpected feature.

But what does it harm?  If you can figure out a way to remove
it that doesn't introduce worse problems, then fine.  But just
commenting out the line of code causes at least these bad
side effects that I can remember.  There may well be others
I forgotten in detail.

- No prompt to tell the user that the mouse click has been 
  processed

- The missing prompt is diagnostic of a deeper problem, 
  that gnuplot itself does not yet realize the operation is
  finished.  For example, try '  load "mousevariables.dem"'
  and you will see that the demo fails unless you type
  extra carriage returns.

- If you control-C out of 'pause mouse' then subsequent
  commands generate a "mousing not active" error message

-- 
Ethan A Merritt
Department of Biochemistry & Biomolecular Structure Center
University of Washington, Seattle