Re: [Gretl-users] new in CVS

Dear all, a few comments on the ideas that Jack and the others have suggested. I leave aside the issue of the icons for the moment. I really like the suggestion to give gretl users the possibility to open the log window automatically when they launch the program, or at least introduce an icon at the bottom of the main window to open the log. One possible issue associated with this suggestion is that this increases further the number of open windows in gretl. The need to constantly move across quite independent windows is something that sometimes I find really annoying. I appreciate the reasons behind this strategy and I am not suggesting to switch to a completely different setting. A possible escape and, according to me, a way to have the best of both worlds is giving users the possibility to join/divide the frames. I am thinking about something similar to what you can do in Blender: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Interface/Window_system/... If you introduce also the possibility to save a given arrangement, this will give the possibility to easily customize the workspace in a very flexible way, without harming users with small screens. This way a user can also easily recreate any frame arrangement he/she is more familiar with (rstudio, stata, matlab,eviews...). (Any small change that reduces switching costs should be welcome if we want to increase the number of users.) Finally, some thoughts about the suggestion to introduce in the log windows a "gears icon" to re-run the commands. I suggest to increase the linkages between the log window and the shell: instead of automatically re-run a command, by clicking on a command in the log window this simply appears in the shell (it is not automatically run), so you can modify it before running it (that's because most of the time you do not want to re-run exactly the same command, but a slightly different version of it). I know that the previous commands can be recovered using the up arrow in the shell, but when the command is quite "old" and you do not remember exactly how far it is in the history, this process can be quite time consuming. Of course, it goes without saying that: - these are just a bunch of comments (that I wrote down just because Jack asked for them), so take them as they are - these issues might be probably better discussed in the Gretl-devel list (which I have just subscribed...); - this is an open source project and the power to decide where to go should be proportional to the time spent in the project and the capacity to make things happen, and I lack of both... ;-) Bye Giuseppe