drag-and-drop a datafile now also supports appending
by Sven Schreiber
Hi everybody,
here's some info on a brand new little interface feature that you might
not notice otherwise. (It's in the development snapshots already.)
Many of you probably know already that you can drag-and-drop a datafile
with the mouse onto the gretl main window to open it. (gretl formats
.gdt or .gdtb, and actually other supported formats as well. If you have
the gretl console set to be merged into the main window on the
right-hand side, this only works in the left area of the window where
the variables' listing appears.)
Now when you have a dataset already active and drag-and-drop another
file onto gretl, appending the new datafile contents to the old dataset
is also possible. Of course, in such a situation gretl cannot know by
itself what exactly you want, so a dialog window will pop up asking you
for your choice: open as new dataset or append to the old one?
The type of action directly corresponds to gretl's commands 'append' and
'join'. As you may know, 'append' is easier but 'join' is more general
and powerful.
(Are animated GIFs actually supported on this mailing list? Maybe this
would be a good case to prepare and attach one, showing the dragging and
dropping....)
cheers
sven
3 years, 3 months
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Contributed function packages in 2022
by Sven Schreiber
Dear all,
happy new year to everybody!
Now that the year 2022 is over, just a small piece of trivial
information: There are 48 contributed function packages that have been
updated during the last year - although it has to be said that in many
cases the updates consisted of smaller syntax adjustments.
This number doesn't include the so-called "addons": those are also
function packages written in the hansl scripting language (like the
contributed packages), but they are more tightly integrated into the
gretl infrastructure and are automatically shipped with each gretl
install. Currently there are 10 addons (see Help / look for addons),
half of which have been updated during 2022. For comparison, there are
155 contributed packages in total.
We would like to encourage everybody to get in the business of authoring
and contributing function packages. The scripting language hansl is easy
to learn, but powerful. And in general gretl offers documentation that
is quite comprehensive: See Help / A Hansl Primer for an introduction to
the language (in combination with the general gretl user guide, of
course), and Help / Gretl Function Packaging Guide.
Every package version has to go through a moderation process, where we
as the moderation team make sure that (a) the package actually runs and
works, and (b) has at least a minimal amount of documentation.
Especially for first-time contributors, we're happy to help with
problems and provide some hints. However, the package authors obviously
remain responsible for what their code does and what results it
produces. (Apart from the obvious fact that like any GPL'ed free / open
source software, neither gretl itself nor the contributed packages come
with any kind of warranties.)
cheers
sven
3 years, 3 months
- 1
- 0