ANNOUNCE: jmath-0.9.6 a command-line frontend for Mathematica
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg14857] ANNOUNCE: jmath-0.9.6 a command-line frontend for Mathematica
- From: Jim Radford <radford at robby.caltech.edu>
- Date: Fri, 20 Nov 1998 02:17:03 -0500
- Organization: California Institute of Technology, Pasadena
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
If you have tried the text frontend that comes with Mathematica then you must know the pain I felt before there was JMath. There is no command history, editing, symbol completion or recognition that the window size has changed. These are features I have come to expect from a command line program. JMath <http://robby.caltech.edu/~radford/jmath> is a text based frontend for Mathematica <http://www.mathematica.com/> that is based on the GNU Readline library <ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu>. It is to Mathematica what tcsh/bash are to csh/sh. If you don't know what these are then you probably don't want this program. The following are some of it's advantages over the default text based frontend 'math'. o Command line editing and history (via readline) o Symbol completion o Lets Mathematica know when terminal is resized o Moves cursor to position of syntax errors for easy correction In order to build JMath you will need a copy of GNU Readline. If you don't have it it can be found at <ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/pub/gnu>. I have tested JMath on Solaris/Linux/Irix with Mathematica-3.0 and readline-2.1 and readline-2.2. I also have Linux SRPMs available. -Jim