The primary issue with moving forward on this bug is that users may want the main Application launcher for Octave to start Octave as it does now, on the command window. At the same time, users may want to be able to double click on a file in the file browser and have it be opened in Octave with the file editor tab open, as opposed to running the file as a script.

On GNU/Linux desktops, a single .desktop file has to serve both purposes of "how to run this program" and "how to use this program to open a file". Typically this is just "program-name" vs "program-name file-name", but in our case we want the latter to open the file in the editor.

One way forward might be to register dbus API calls with Octave. If the user invokes some dbus method to open a file in the editor, and Octave isn't already running, an instance of Octave would start first to handle the dbus function call. See bug #42603 for this specific bug.

But mainly, we need a single command line to put in the Exec entry of a desktop file that means "run Octave normally with the command window open" and at the same time means "run Octave and open the given file in a new file editor tab when given a file argument".

I do not think we want "octave foo.m" to mean "run foo.m as a script", but "octave --gui foo.m" to mean open foo.m in the file editor.

And I do not think "octave --gui --persist --eval "edit '%f'" is a solution because that will always open a new editor window and set focus to the editor as opposed to the command window.

On my system, running octave --force-gui --persist --eval 'edit ""' will open the GUI on the text editor tab without throwing any error.  Seems handy that edit() without any arguments opens a new instance of the text editor (this is not a feature of the GUI, on Octave 3.8 using another text editor, edit() without any arguments opened my editor with a new empty buffer.

If there was an --editor option, the behaviour could be

• no filenames - open GUI on the editor
• single filenames - open that files
• multiple filenames - open all those files

and there would be no need for two desktop entries.

I think the workaround mentioned already solves the first two cases.

The only thing is, what happens if the user has defined an editor on their octaverc ? I tried to do it, and it still opened the file on the Octave GUI editor which is weird for me. Shouldn't my editor preferences be kept, specially since I am setting them myself and not relying on defaulting to emacs?

During installation, Octave "registers" as being able to handle Octave and Matlab files.

This means that double click on a file with MIME type text/x-octave and text/x-matlab will open on Octave session.  However, this will only execute the file not open it on the Octave GUI editor which is probably what a user wants. With the octave program now being both a language and an IDE, an "--edit" option would be useful to do this.

Bug #42603 (GUI: allow opening an m-file in the editor of a running instance) is related to this issue.  They solve the problem related on this bug by having desktop applications opening files with 'octave --force-gui --persist --eval "edit %1"'

The same workaround can be used by having the following line on http://hg.savannah.gnu.org/hgweb/octave/file/bf511802add7/etc/icons/octave.desktop.in

Exec=/usr/local/bin/octave --force-gui --persist --eval "edit %f"

Or should we really get an --editor flag that could maybe even accept multiple files?