Re: SWI-Prolog MacOS app

On 08/19/2013 12:10 AM, Richard A. O'Keefe wrote:
> One thing I like about the R GUI is that if you do
> 	% open <<directory>> -a R
> it starts up with <<directory>> as its current directory.

That should be easy and makes a lot of sense (mostly for defining
a shell alias, I guess).  It touches my old wish to change the
commandline handling to take additional parameters as files without
using options (-s or -l) now.   Now, the Windows version already
has the hack to accept a single Prolog file as argument.  Maybe
we should allow for (after processing - and -- args)

	[dir] [file1.ext [file2.ext] ...]

where ext is a known Prolog extension for file-names (this is
configurable)

> As for opening from Applications (and I most earnestly hope that
> you mean ~/Applications), I would expect the program to save

The SWI-Prolog.app is fully relocatable.  You can install it wherever
you want or just run it from the .dmg file.

> portions of its state in ~/Library/SWIProlog/  (so that
> File|Recent works).  So it doesn't much matter where it starts
> the first time you run it, as long as the second time it picks
> up where it left off.

Ok.  Asked Carlo to see whether we can get access to the OS
specific preference store from Prolog through Qt.

> Starting a new instance would I think come as a surprise to most
> Mac users.  I have a several programming language implementations
> on my Mac, and none of them start a new instance when you open a
> second file.  They all just open a new editing window (or tab).

Ok.  Will change that to open the editor or, maybe as Paulo suggested
to have an option.

> As for file extensions, it's a matter of Cmd-I and a few clicks
> to associate either a single file or all instances of an
> extensions with the application of your choice, so I wouldn't
> worry about making the perfect extension list.  (I have no idea
> why '.pl' files default to TextWrangler on my machine.)

Great.  I already had the impression this is not such as big issue
as in Windows.

	Cheers --- Jan