On Mon, Jul 8, 2013 at 2:05 PM, Robert Bradshaw <rober...@math.washington.edu> wrote: > On Mon, Jul 8, 2013 at 1:55 AM, Julien Puydt <julien.pu...@laposte.net> > wrote: >> >> Le 08/07/2013 10:51, Nils Bruin a écrit : >>> >>> On Monday, July 8, 2013 4:05:29 AM UTC+2, Volker Braun wrote: >>> >>> Frédéric Chapoton has written a patch at >>> http://trac.sagemath.org/14733 <http://trac.sagemath.org/14733> that >>> >>> will beautify the Sage startup banner using some UTF-8 characters to >>> draw the box. This will display incorrectly in terminals that do not >>> support UTF-8. In that case, Sage still works but the box around the >>> banner is garbled (most likely rendered by placeholder signs for >>> non-ASCII characters). >>> >>> >>> -1 to a UTF-8 banner. There's hardly anything in the sage command line >>> that requires a UTF-8 capable terminal (all the colour stuff should shut >>> off automatically for a "dumb" terminal). Why require it for *just* the >>> banner? >>> >>> More personally, I dislike the UTF-8 banner because it looks too nice. >>> To me it doesn't fit with the simple prompt-and-return-value interface >>> (see banners of magma, maple, R, matlab, pari/GP, python, IPython, GAP, >>> Singular). The "graphics" looking lines are more suggestive of a >>> menu-driven interface to me, like the text-based "dialog" interfaces. So >>> to me, the "+-|"-built borders raise expectations more appropriate for >>> what sage command line offers. >> >> >> -1 too for the same reasons. >> >> Keep the banner short and simple ; people don't come to sage to enjoy that >> sight! > > > I agree, no need to have fancy unicode here. If you're doing something that > requires nice output you should probably be using a notebook interface > anyways; the CLI interface just isn't going to go there and going part way > is worse than just keeping things simple.
I used the patch, and I think it is beautiful. I completely disagree with the comments such as " I dislike the UTF-8 banner because it looks too nice." and "Keep the banner short and simple ; people don't come to sage to enjoy that sight!" Clean beauty is exactly what people (at least me!) want in software. The banner in Sage right now, which I probably wrote (?), looks frankly ugly and like a hack, compared to the one on this patch. Also, UTF is clearly the future of strings, having native default support in modern interpreters, editors, etc., and also being critical to supporting users who aren't using English. This patch is along the same lines as the recent inclusion of a nice color prompt (thanks Volker) in that it makes Sage prettier and more pleasant to use. So my strong vote *for* this ticket. Moreover, I like it so much I'll be henceforth applying it to the standard system-wide version of Sage at https://cloud.sagemath.com, even if it doesn't get into Sage. In particular, I disagree with " If you're doing something that requires nice output you should probably be using a notebook interface anyways" -- since the terminal interface *is* part of the notebook interface now, and it must look nice. -- William -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
