Capabilities for navigating my trove of LyX documents

David Mertens mertendc at eckerd.edu
Tue Nov 5 13:15:27 UTC 2019


Hello Paul, list,

Thank you for your ideas. The batch file/bash script for keeping a set of
tabs coherent is an excellent idea!

Unfortunately, the bookmarks suggestion won't work for me. Most of my
notebooks have figures generated by analysis scripts (usually PNG these
days). When LyX opens a symbolic link, it will look for relative paths
relative to the symbolic link's directory. I use relative paths all over
the place because I synchronize my notebooks across two different machines
with different usernames, and thus different full paths. If I use relative
figure filenames, LyX can find the figures whether I open them on my laptop
of the lab machine, but that would break bookmarking.

Note: I tried using a tilde to represent the home directory for figures,
something like "~/projects/2019/.../some-figure.png". This works in LyX,
but the way it works is that LyX replaces the tilde with my current user's
home directory as soon as I close the Graphics dialog. If LyX kept the
tilde in the path to the file, I would be able to express "absolute" paths
across my two different users.

Upon further reflection, I feel like at least some fraction of this
behaviour could be implemented use lyxpipe if lyxpipe could speak to all
open sessions. For example, if there were a command-line option to give the
LyX session a name, then I could use the batch-file trick to save tabs *and*
associate a name with the session. I could then implement a third-party GUI
program that handles bookmarked notebooks and could speak to the different
sessions as needed.

David

On Sat, Nov 2, 2019 at 4:49 PM Paul A. Rubin <parubin73 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 11/2/19 12:04 PM, David Mertens wrote:
>
> Hello everyone,
>
> After years of using LyX for research notebooks, I find myself these days
> working with sets of documents much like I have sets of tabs in my browser.
> I would really, really like to be able to open up sets of documents just
> like I can open up sets of tabs in a browser, and I would also really like
> to be able to bookmark documents much like I can bookmark web pages.
> Finally, it would be really nice if I could embed LyX links to other
> documents to refer to previous calculations or experimental results, so
> that I could click on it and LyX would open the document in a new tab. This
> would really, really facilitate my scholarly work.
>
> Apart from the bookmarking, most of these are "solved" by opening multiple
> LyX sessions with the tabs I need, then never restarting my laptop for
> weeks on end. However, when my laptop inadvertently loses power, all of
> that "state" is lost and I have to recreate it from scratch.
>
> I have looked into implementing some of these ideas with lyxpipe
> programming, but as I said I use multiple LyX sessions for different kinds
> of work: one research project, another research project, one class, and
> another class all need their own tab sets, so they go in different
> sessions. lyxpipe can only talk with the first LyX process that starts.
>
> As far as I can tell, LyX does not have any of these capabilities and
> lyxpipe is not the way to implement them. Am I wrong? If I wanted to
> implement them, what is the most sensible way to do so? Is there an
> extension mechanism for this kind of thing besides lyxpipe? Finally, what
> are the tools that others use to organize large collections of notebook-ish
> files?
>
> Thanks!
> David
>
> P.S. I am not (yet) subscribed to the user list, so I'd appreciate if
> replies included my email address explicitly. Thanks!
>
> --
> *David Mertens*
> Assistant Professor of Physics
> 727.864.8521
>
> Office Hours can be made by appointment within the following time blocks:
>
>    - Tuesday 11:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., MPC 213
>    - Thursday 11:30 a.m. to 2:00 p.m., MPC 107
>    - Friday 1:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m., MPC 107
>
>
> Eckerd College <http://www.eckerd.edu>
> 4200 54th Avenue South
> St. Petersburg, Florida 33711
> [image: Eckerd College logo]
>
> At least part of this is fairly easy to implement.
>
> Opening sets of documents: You can set up a one-line batch file to open a
> particular bunch of documents. Omitting the path info for brevity, "lyx
> file1.lyx file2.lyx ..." will open all the files listed in one LyX window.
> Similarly, "lyx *.lyx" will open all the .lyx files in the directory where
> the command is being run (at least on Linux, but I imagine also on MacOS
> and Windows).
>
> Bookmarks: LyX lets you open files from a list of recently opened ones. If
> that's not sufficient, one possibility is to create a folder (directory)
> someplace for "bookmarks". In that folder, put a link to each file you
> would like to bookmark. (On Linux, this is known as a symlink. Windows and,
> I assume, MacOS also support symlinks.) You can optionally go to Tools >
> Preferences > Paths and change your "Working directory" path to that
> folder, which means LyX will always default to that folder when you are
> opening a file. (You can still navigate to other documents using the file
> chooser.)
>
> Paul
>
>

-- 
*David Mertens*
Assistant Professor of Physics
727.864.8521

Office Hours can be made by appointment within the following time blocks:

   - Tuesday 11:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., MPC 213
   - Thursday 11:30 a.m. to 2:00 p.m., MPC 107
   - Friday 1:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m., MPC 107


Eckerd College <http://www.eckerd.edu>
4200 54th Avenue South
St. Petersburg, Florida 33711
[image: Eckerd College logo]
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