Installation and User Interface issues

[Joe Tusek]

Hi,

I have had a read on the forum and tried to google my way out of the problem but can't seem to find what I need to get me going with Julia and Juno. Julia looks very promising (being a Matab user) but at present I can't get past square one. Some things I notice (On W7 machine)

1) I can't widen the Julia window by dragging it wider with the mouse. I can make it taller using the mouse to drag it but can't widen it. I can widen it manually through the Properties/Defaults menu options though and once widened this way the window can then be made smaller by dragging with the mouse and made wider up to that menu width specified but no wider, just seems like a bug?

2)I can't cut and paste text from the Julia screen as anticipated, I have to highlight it all using the menu item (select all) or if I set the editor mode to QuickEdit mode then I can highlight a rectangle but it does not follow the natural extent of text so again not that good. Makes it difficult to cut and past error messages or any other multiline non-rectangular text output. It would be beneficial to highlight (and then cut and paste) any element of text on the screen either in window mode or line mode.

3) I have tried all that I can understand by way of suggestions to get Juno to work with Julia. I have put code in the same User directories, I have uninstalled and reinstalled etc. Unfortunately Juno won't work in for me with Julia and Pkg.add("Jewel") won't work either.

For Juno I get the following error when it starts,

ERROR: unable to read directory METADATA: No error
 in systemerror at error.jl:39 (repeats 2 times)
while loading c:\Users\Joe.Tusek\AppData\Local\Julia-0.3.9\juno-windows-x64\windows64\resources\app\plugins\Julia-LT\jl\init.jl, in expression starting on line 24

For Julia I get

julia> Pkg.add("Jewel")
ERROR: could not spawn setenv(`git rev-parse --git-dir`; dir="C:\\Users\\Joe.Tusek\\.julia\\v0.3\\METADATA"): no such file or directory (ENOENT)
 in _jl_spawn at process.jl:217 (repeats 2 times)

So overall, I don't really have an idea now how to get Juno working with Julia and don't know why Julia won't run the  Pkg.add("Jewel") command.

If someone can guide me through this I would be grateful.

[Tony Kelman]

Issue 1 and 2 are not really bugs with Julia, they are inherent limitations of the Windows console host prior to Windows 10. Run cmd.exe and you'll see the same behavior. There are several options for more nicely usable terminal emulators on Windows, and we hope to eventually bundle one of them with the Julia installer on Windows and use it by default for the REPL. See https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/7267 for much more information there. You can also manually install one of these and use Julia within it, subject to some potential caveats / actual Julia bugs.

On issue 3 - hit the semicolon ; to switch into repl mode, what happens if you run "where git" ?

Then try to run:

cd C:\\Users\\Joe.Tusek\\.julia\\v0.3\\METADATA

git rev-parse --git-dir

You may get the same error, or you may see your .julia directory does not exist? You can try deleting the .julia directory then running Pkg.init() again in Julia and see if anything different happens.

[Joe Tusek]

Tony,

Problem solved. I was able to get things working by using your last suggestion "deleting the .julia directory then running Pkg.init() again in Julia". Juno then installed a bunch of packages when I ran it and connected to Julia and was able to evaluate the example script from within Juno. Thanks for your assistance.

[Tony Kelman]

Great, good to hear that. Sorry for the trouble and thanks for your patience and sticking with it. We hope to streamline a lot of these installation hiccups over time.