Capabilities for navigating my trove of LyX documents
Paul A. Rubin
parubin73 at gmail.com
Tue Nov 5 16:51:41 UTC 2019
On 11/5/19 11:47 AM, David Mertens wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 5, 2019 at 10:22 AM Paul A. Rubin <parubin73 at gmail.com
> <mailto: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
>> <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!
>>
>>> 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
>>
>>
>>
> 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?
>
It's designed for people with short attention spans, who wouldn't make
it to the bottom if any significant scrolling was involved.
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