When ran on Windows, sage_shell_mode somehow misses Sage's prompts.

[EmmanuelCharpentier]

I recently attempted to test the usability of Sage on Windows 10 computers (which are still the dominant platform among "general users"). See this message for an account.

I used two different setups :

• Erik Bray's Windows installer (available here) and Gnu Emacs native Windows port (available here)

• The Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), where I installed Ubuntu Xenial (16.04), emacs 25.1, texlive and recompiled Sage 7.6.beta3 (see the thread mentioned above for details), and the VcXsrv X windows server.

In both setup, I installed sage_shell_mode via MELPA. In both setups, I observed the following behaviour :

• In command-line, sage starts (with no problems whatsoever on Erik Brays Cygwn port, with a complaint about a missing /proc/vmstat on WSL).

• The Jupyter notebook works (with a slow start...), and is usable.

• Emacs works with no problems.

• sage-shell:run-sage sort-of works : it displays the Sage banner (and, in WSL, the complaint about missing /proc/vmstat) but never displays the sage: prompt.

• after a suitable wait, one can type 2+2, hit Return and Sage happily answers 4, but still gives no prompt. Similarly, asking integrate(arctan(x),x) will get you x*arctan(x) - 1/2*log(x^2+1)

• typing plot(sin(x,-pi,pi), figsize=3) gives the expected graph in WSL (displayed by imagemagick) ; it does nothing in Cygwin's setup (but Sage is still functional after that).

• toggling either "Enable inline typeset output" or "Enable inline plots" sends emacs in an endless loop, where it does not sees ^C : you have to kill it manually (via Windows' task monitor for the Cygwin setup, via killall emacs in the WLS setup).

One more data point : in the WSL setup, I have been able to use Sage's Maxima and the relevant imaxima files to get a filly working imaxima setup, with typeset math output and inline plots. I did not think of this test when testing the Cygwin setup.

This made me think of the recent problem introduced by the new IPython management of prompts, but I found nothing relevant.

This issue might be relevant to (future) Sage-on-Windows users.

[stakemori]

Thank you for making the detailed report. I've never tried Sage on Windows, but will look into the problem.