Capabilities for navigating my trove of LyX documents

Tue Nov 5 15:22:36 UTC 2019

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 
> <mailto: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
>>     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
> 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.

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