Capabilities for navigating my trove of LyX documents

David Mertens mertendc at eckerd.edu
Tue Nov 5 16:47:36 UTC 2019


On Tue, Nov 5, 2019 at 10:22 AM Paul A. Rubin <parubin73 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 11/5/19 8:15 AM, David Mertens wrote:
>
> 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]
>
> For the bookmarking thing, what about creating a folder with symlinks to
> the working directories of your various notebooks and making that the
> "Working directory" in preferences? To open a document, you would click
> File > Open, double-click the link to the directory for the "bookmarked"
> project, then open the file there. Does that still cause relative link
> problems?
>
> Paul
>
> PS: For list purposes, bottom posting is preferred.
>
>
Ah, the Law of Indirection
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Wheeler_(computer_scientist)#Quotes>.
Of course! You are correct, this would solve the bookmark problem. The only
issue, which isn't really an issue, is that I don't think LyX is smart
enough to reuse cached images. But having a working bookmark system is well
worth a few extra CPU cycles.

Thanks!

P.S. Why does Gmail's default behavior make bottom-posting such a pain?

-- 
*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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