Dear sage-devel,
I will admit that I am a command-line-interface kind of person; however, I sometimes use the notebook when I'm showing examples to a (say calculus) class, or when I give a talk. And I'm really happy the notebook is there and people are working hard to improve it. Getting to the point: I spent some time with the notebook (in sage-4.2) this week, and in the process I have accumulated a few comments and requests. I'm posting these here so they don't get lost. They are in random order. 1. docstrings and source introspection: typing "blah?" gives a nicely typeset docstring of "blah". Typing "blah??" give an "ugly" docstring and a nicely typeset source code. Question: would it be possible to make "blah??" show the nicely typeset verion of the docstring? 2. if a tab-completion returns a lot of possibilities, they seem to get cut off after a while (concrete example: G = graphs.HouseGraph() G.<TAB> ) is this a bug or a feature? 3. long worksheet titles get cut off even if there would be enough room to display them in their entirety (in my case, I had "Victorian Algebra Conference 2009" which appeared as "Victorian Algebra Conference 2...") 4. in the upper left corner of the worksheet, there is the Sage logo and the version, and just to the right of this it says "The Sage Notebook". Both of these items have the same hyperlink attached, namely nb.sagemath.org. Would it be a good idea to have the Sage logo hyperlink to sagemath.org, and leave "The Sage Notebook" linked to nb.sagemath.org? 5. try entering type(SL(2, 7)) there's something broken at the end of the output 6. this comes up in the previous example, but I believe it's more general: output appears to get wrapped around independently of the amount of screen real estate. is there a way to fix it? 7. I like the way list output comes up somewhat structured in the command-line interface: sage: G = SymmetricGroup(4) sage: G.normal_subgroups() [Permutation Group with generators [()], Permutation Group with generators [(1,3)(2,4), (1,4)(2,3)], Permutation Group with generators [(2,4,3), (1,3)(2,4), (1,4)(2,3)], Permutation Group with generators [(1,2), (1,2,3,4)]] In the notebook, this is much harder to parse by a human: [Permutation Group with generators [()], Permutation Group with generators [(1,3)(2,4), (1,4)(2,3)], Permutation Group with generators [(2,4,3), (1,3)(2,4), (1,4)(2,3)], Permutation Group with generators [(1,2), (1,2,3,4)]] 8. I don't have an example at hand at the moment, but maybe this rings a bell: once in a while, when I go through a fairly long worksheet and evaluate cells one by one, I get thrown all the way to the end of the worksheet. This is not a huge deal, but it's a bit disconcerting if you're giving a talk and have to constantly scroll back to where you were supposed to be. 9. The linear nature of the notebook worksheet clashes a bit with my idea of "slides". I tried to remedy this by inserting blank text paragraphs as breaks between "slides", but this is not perfect. Would it be possible to insert some sort of marker saying "this is the beginning of the next slide", together with keyboard shortcuts for jumping to the next/previous slide? That would make my life easier when preparing a talk, and the final result would look more professional. I think that's it. Thanks again to everyone who's been working on the notebook, and I hope this feedback is of some value. Best, Alex -- Alex Ghitza -- Lecturer in Mathematics -- The University of Melbourne -- Australia -- http://www.ms.unimelb.edu.au/~aghitza/ --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
