Tuesday, March 10, 2015

Fixing Autoscroll in GNU Octave for Windows

Introduction
A quick and dirty post documenting an Octave "fix" for a problem I was having. Running GNU Octave version 3.8.2-5 from MXE installer found HERE on a Windows 7 64 bit PC on 3/10/2015.

The Problem

The output of GNU Octave as installed above has a feature that while I am sure is useful to some, is quite irritating to me. Outputs that are too long to fit on the screen of the terminal are paginated. It will display the values that will fit on the screen and then wait for you to press "f" to see the next page worth's of data. See below. It displays "-- less -- (f)oward, (b)ack, (q)uit" at the end of each page.

While this may be great if you want to see every single value, if you are running long programs where the output is mostly for debugging purposes or similar, this can be irritating. I finally decided to figure out how to change this. Here it is.


A Solution

While I don't claim to understand exactly what is going on above, it is clear that the "pager" being used on my install is "less". I wanted to change it to "more".

1) Check what pager you are using - Type "PAGER()". My guess is it will probably be "less". 

2) View help file on PAGER() - Type "help PAGER". A couple useful websites: Documentation from a German university and Documentation on the Octave Wiki.

3) Change pager to "more" - Type "PAGER("more")

This should make the output look like the picture below. As you can see it scrolled through my entire output just fine. I will note that "PAGER()" now returns "more". Honestly, I don't really know what I changed under the hood, but it worked. Also note that it will reset when you reopen Octave.


That is all I have on this. If anyone has a more detailed explanation of how this works or other ways to fix this "problem" feel free to post in the comments.
-Matthew

No comments:

Post a Comment