QtOctave – a front-end to GNU Octave for Linux and OSX
Surely many of those that have to do with programs for scientific use, have used Matlab, or at least will have heard.
E'sicuramente the most complete suite for calculating that there is, but it also has a price not available to everyone!
GNU Octave comes in handy, having a syntax very similar to Matlab, and having the great advantage of being completely free, updated, and multiplatform. The effort of the developers in part is aimed at increasing the compatibility with the increasingly more expensive… cugino Matlab.
By going to open the first time you can become disoriented, because Octave does not have any GUI (GUI), but works in text mode (In short, you type and look at the output directly into the terminal).
Regarding the plotting of graphs, can be used without problems in GNU Plot (in this regard read this article, if you are using OSX), but for everything else (icons with the main functions at your fingertips, easy to find in Help, since it is not a software where you can remember all the commands in memory, etc.. etc..) there is quite a gap with Matlab.
In this sense we can meet with the excellent QtOctave that, as the author says:
QtOctave is a front-end for Octave. Octave is a spreadsheet program similar to Matlab. Octave usually tedious chores. QtOctave deals, through menus and windows to facilitate these tasks, and simplify the management of Octave.
The project blog can be found at qtoctave.wordpress.com
The intention to visit him blog. They make your comments, ideas, contributions,…
In short, a graphical frontend will not be appreciated by geek terminal, but it makes life easier, let's not tell each other stories 🙂
As the name, the front-end uses the Qt graphics library, so OSX or Linux that is, remember to install the qt-lib4.
At this link You can download both source, is some binary packages for some distributions, although not extremely recent.
It, in case you are using Ubuntu, look for your package in the repositories in THIS LINK
Regarding OSX, find the binary compiled Qtoctave this address, and the dmg is installed either on a Tiger on Leopard (tested both).
As it is written in the instructions, Also in this case you need to download the libqt4 for OSX, otherwise all you will get, will be a bell'errore in the terminal, and then you will tell the front-end where they are binaries Octave.
Ah, About, the best version of Octave to download for OSX is available on the Octave-forge 🙂