This is perhaps somewhat a digression, but nonetheless: A couple of years ago when I last participated here at Mapleprimes, in a document of mine I kept a record of valuable posts and threads. These links now seem all to be broken, each producing "404 - File or directory not found". This, I think, is bad website management. If moving posts and threads to other URL's, which, of course, may be quite legitimate, should one not have taken care to somehow redirect the old ones?

@Alejandro Jakubi: With "A corporate culture, I guess..." you hit the nail right on its head, I think. Perhaps this strategy will backfire on Maplesoft at some point in the future.

Thanks, Carl Love, for calling for MapleSoft to attend to this issue.

@Alejandro Jakubi: The chronologically disordering of the comments in threads like these is highly annoying, I completely agree. I have actually been wondering whether it was my browser that behaved oddly, but I could not see how. Why does Maplesoft not do anything about this?, one may legitimately ask.

Note added: Carl Love has just posted a Mapleprimes suggestion regarding this disordering.

@Alejandro Jakubi: I have downloaded and installed medit, no problems. And I have managed to add a shell script entry as outlined in your comment Configuration of Medit, putting the following in the script box (with the line shown broken only to make it render properly here on mapleprimes):

"C:\Program Files\Maple 17\bin.X86_64_WINDOWS\cmaple.exe" -I
"C:\Program Files\Maple 17\lib\include"

to invoke the command-line version of Maple. But when trying this on some simple document, like 5+2;, in the output pane there appears an error:

> -n "5 + 2;" 
> quit
on line 2, syntax error, unexpected string:
quit
^
> quit
memory used=0.7MB, alloc=8.3MB, time=0.03
*** Done ***

I am grappling a bit in the dark now. Are you able to locate my mistake?

@Alejandro Jakubi: Ok, I will try to be an eagle, then; I guess I am out of bad excuses :-). Thanks for your offer of assistance, if all fails.

@Alejandro Jakubi: I did not know that jedit, too, is based on Java. However, it does not really bother me as long as it, unlike the Maple GUI, runs flawlessly (which it has done so far).

Thanks for those extra details on medit. Being no shell-programming wizard, having absolutely no experience with either lua (have not even heard of it before) or python, it makes me hesitate trying it out, though. But perhaps I am just being chicken.

I, too, use # and (* *) to comment out code lines or sections in jedit that I do not want to be executed in Maple when running the whole document. Although perhaps acceptable, it is certainly not optimal, and in combination with the need to switch between windows, the setup as a whole can become somewhat annoying. Being able to avoid the latter is therefore certainly something that makes medit seem attractive.

@Mac Dude: I cannot, of course, answer for "you guys" in general, but presently a program of mine is 475 lines long (including some blank lines). And it is already broken up into separate pieces in the sense that all the functions/procedures of mine, some of which are used in this main code, are stored in various other documents (so that they are generally available from other documents as well).

But I get annoyed with the Maple GUI long before I even reach 100 lines of code; only a few lines of code can be enough to get me worked up. Perhaps you have a higher pain threshold than I have :-).

@Alejandro Jakubi: For the moment I am using jEdit, which I became aware of in a comment by Will. Although I am very satisfied with it by itself, having highlighting, bracket-matching, etc., the setup as a whole, at least as I use it, has the disadvantage (as previously mentioned) that I have to switch back and forth between windows, and usually execute whole documents rather than just single execution groups.

From the image provided in the your comment in the thread you link to it could seem as if some of these issues are not present if using medit. Is that correct? If so, then medit would certainly be worth considering as a substitute for jEdit.

@Alejandro Jakubi: I completely agree.

I think you hit the nail on its head when you (in the other thread you link to) write "One of the design problems in the Standard GUI is that typesetting and computation are interwined."

In my view it should, contrary to what the manager seems to think, be blatantly obvious that the current GUI is not good for everyone. The current GUI seems suitable only for very small amounts of code, because something as trivial as tab-indentation, to create visual structure in it, is not possible; having to repeatedly press the spacebar in order to achieve something visually similar is, of course, quite unacceptable. It is a mystery to me how Maplesoft can justify treating their (more advanced) users this way.

When I bought Maple 17 some weeks ago, I certainly thought that the tabbing-issue of Maple 11, see I declare defeat: rolling back to Maple 9.5, had long since been rectified, but I was mistaken. Now I have learnt to use an external editor for larger amounts of code, using the worksheet only for communicating with the Maple engine (loading the externally created and edited documents with the read-command). That is certainly not optimal, having this way to switch back and forth between windows, and having often to execute whole documents instead of just a single execution group, but what can one do?

@Alejandro Jakubi: I certainly think you have a point regarding Maplesoft. Thanks.

Easy to use diagnostic tools for the Standard GUI would indeed be very welcome. But even more welcome would, of course, be a GUI that worked as flawlessly as possible. I mean, one would expect at least the most basic things in any GUI to be working that way by version 17, now shortly version 18.

I guess the GUI broke badly with the introduction of 2D Math by way of XML-coding back in Maple 11. Tab-indented lines are no longer possible, and even simple navigation with the arrows are quite often not intuitive. For instance, when being positioned at the end of a line after a semicolon, it sometimes takes two left-arrow strokes to position the cursor to the left of the semicolon (as if one has to move past some invisible character); such issues may seem small nuisances, but they are not, because they break up ones workflow.

@Alejandro Jakubi: Please forgive me, but such advanced issues seem to be way over my head.

@Alejandro Jakubi: Ah, now I understand.

After having started up Maple from the command prompt, I have just frozen some worksheet. Unfortunately, it left no message in the command prompt.

@Alejandro Jakubi: Thanks. I have just lauched maplew.exe from the command prompt. It provided nothing new, starting up Maple in the usual manner, and prompting nothing in the command prompt window.

@Alejandro Jakubi: Thanks for your comment.

According to http://visualvm.java.net/relnotes.html, the required software for VisualVM is Oracle JDK 7+, OpenJDK 7+, IcedTea 7+, and HP-UX JDK 7.0.x+. Some of these, if not all of them, I have no experience with, and thus I do not feel qualified to install VisualVM on my machine; or perhaps rather: I do not dare to.

This is perhaps a silly question, but how (if you know that for Windows) is the GUI launched from the Windows command prompt?