I looked into this early on in textmate's life, but never found a solution that I would call graceful. However, the work recently done by Hans connecting to R in textmate may provide some inspiration. Also, there was a terminal plugin based on iterm built as a proof of concept some time ago that could also perhaps be used, but I never had much success getting that running, and I don't know that it's still actively maintained.

-d

Matlab is now Java-based, but provides terminal access as well. Personally I almost exclusively use the terminal and textmate, both out of habit (the early Java versions were both slow and buggy, though it appears the devs at Mathworks have fixed a lot of that with recent releases) and because a lot of my work requires timing precision that excludes a JVM.

I'm still fairly naive to the details of your approach, but matlab provides an 'eval' function that executes a string passed as code. Could one simply pipe the code to run from textmate into an eval call, followed by a `touch /tmp/file_indicating_script_is_finished`? You'd need to wrap it in a try-catch most likely to ensure that the touch command occurs even if the executed string fails.

I don't think Mathworks provides demos, but Octave may be compatible enough to be a drop in replacement for these purposes. Ideally I guess the Matlab bundle should support Octave as well.

cheers, -d

On 12/17/07, Hans-Jörg Bibiko bibiko@eva.mpg.de wrote:

I'm just fine-tuning the R daemon which runs in a pseudo terminal. The basic idea works pretty well, and if Matlab – to be honest, my last contact with Matlab was about 15 years ago – runs in the Terminal then it should be possible (theoretically) to use the same approach. However, my crucial point with R is the synchronisation, meaning after sending a task to R how does one know whether R did the job. My current approach is very naïve but it works for 98% of all cases; I simply look at R's CPU coverage, but this could not be the end, because if R by itself starts some shell commands etc...

Thus one can try to adopt that idea using the pty library (in Ruby) and run Matlab. BTW is Matlab downloadable for free? Or a test version? Then I could run a dry-run.

--Hans

On 18 Dec 2007, at 00:37, Don Kalar wrote:

I'm still fairly naive to the details of your approach, but matlab provides an 'eval' function that executes a string passed as code. Could one simply pipe the code to run from textmate into an eval call, followed by a `touch /tmp/file_indicating_script_is_finished`? You'd need to wrap it in a try-catch most likely to ensure that the touch command occurs even if the executed string fails.

Yes, I already tried that approach. It works perfectly, even for errors/messages BUT one looses the possibility to interact with R, e.g. readline("Give me the value for x:"). I didn't find a way to distinguish whether R is waiting for the user's input. And unfortunately it's not allowed to overwrite the function 'readline'.

--Hans

On 17 dec 2007, at 21.09, Thomas Aylott - subtleGradient wrote:

On Dec 17, 2007, at 2:27 PM, Miguel Vaz wrote:

...

Btw, a colleague of mine did his "link" with something called HotKeys (I think) in windows. He defined a macro for pasting the selected text in his editor directly in the matlab window. No idea, though, how to make this in os x.

Sounds like a job for… Applescript UI Scripting.

I have a handy command that takes the current selection and pastes it into the terminal. (not directly attached since it is so incredibly dangerous)

Input: Selection or Document Output: Tooltip

   pbcopy
   osascript -e 'tell application "Terminal" to activate' \
           -e 'tell application "System Events"' \
                   -e 'tell application process "terminal"' \
                           -e 'delay 0.1' -e 'keystroke "k"  

using command down' \ -e 'keystroke "v" using command down' \ -e 'end tell' \ -e 'end tell' \ -e 'tell application "TextMate" to activate' echo "Selection Sent to Terminal"

That might be convertible for whatever. I made one similar for doing Second Life code. (I have a whole Second life bundle, if anyone is interested.)

I would love to see that bundle, i have a project in school comming up soon that involves coding a game in second life.