WXMAXIMA(1)

📦 version 26.10.0, in nixpkgs unstable

💅 WXMAXIMA — bestie edition ✨

ok so you're reading the General Commands Manual page for wxmaxima and wxmxdiff and honestly? you're about to have a great time. this is the ✨ NAME ✨ energy: wxmaxima, wxmxdiff — the wxWidgets interface and diff viewer for Maxima 🎀

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

wxmaxima [-v] [-h] [-o <str>] [-e] [-b] [-d] [--logtostderr] [--pipe]
[--exit-on-error] [-f <str>] [-u <str>] [-l <str>] [-X <str>] [-m <str>]
[--enableipc] [input file...]

that's the whole vibe right there, no cap 💜

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

okay so wxMaxima is a graphical front-end to the Maxima computer algebra system, and it's kind of rather self-explanatory, iykyk 💅. it gives you a graphical interface and a 2D formatted output display for Maxima. the menu system lowkey unlocks a huge part of the Maxima native set of commands, plus a browsable Maxima help. the dialogue windows make it super easy to drop in mathematical entities like limits, matrices, etc. 🎀

and bestie, it extends Maxima with a few powerful features — like the ability to create diagrams with one parameter bound to a slider gui control. main character behaviour honestly 👑

you can create worksheets, which can include mathematical cells (and the results) but also different headlines, text cells, images, page breaks, etc. 🌈

Maxima itself is a free (GPL) common lisp implementation based on the original computer algebra system Macsyma developed at MIT. it has full documentation (HTML and info) included. ✨

wxMaxima uses the cross-platform GUI toolkit wxWidgets and runs natively on many operative systems 🫶

and here's a cute little twist: if invoked as wxmxdiff (e.g., via a symbolic link), it acts as if the -d / --diff option was specified, launching directly into the side-by-side Diff viewer comparing the files specified as parameters 💖

🔥 OPTIONS 🔥

okay this is the part where we go through every single one, no skipping, we don't do that here 💅

  • -h, --help — Help: prints a list of options.
  • -v, --version — Prints the current version.
  • -b, --batch — processes the file, saves it afterward. Will halt if wxMaxima finds an error message in Maxima's output and pause if Maxima asks a question.
  • -o, --open=<str> — Open a file at startup.
  • -e, --eval=<str> — Evaluate the file after opening it.
  • -d, --diff — Compare 2 or 3 files side-by-side using the Diff viewer.
  • --logtostderr — Log all "debug messages" sidebar messages to stderr, too.
  • --pipe — Pipe messages from Maxima to stdout.
  • --exit-on-error — Close the program on any Maxima error.
  • -f, --ini=<str> — Allows specifying a file to store the configuration in.
  • -u, --use-version=<str> — Use Maxima version <str>.
  • -l, --lisp=<str> — Use a Maxima compiled with lisp compiler <str>.
  • -X, --extra-args=<str> — Allows to specify extra Maxima arguments.
  • -m, --maxima=<str> — Allows to specify the location of the Maxima binary.
  • --enableipc — Lets Maxima control wxMaxima via interprocess communications.
⚠️ bestie listen to me: use --enableipc with care. that's straight from the page, i'm not being dramatic (ok maybe a little, but the caveat is real) 🙈

💀 EXIT STATUS 💀

a successful run — batch or interactive — exits with status 0. slay. ✨

but a --batch run that halted before finishing (see --exit-on-error above) exits with one of the following statuses instead, so a caller's script can tell why the run stopped without having to parse its log 👑

  1. 90 — Maxima reported an error and --exit-on-error was given.
  2. 91 — Maxima asked an interactive question with no scripted answer available.
  3. 92 — The input file named on the command line could not be opened.
  4. 93 — Saving the worksheet failed.
  5. 94 — An embedded image's data could not be loaded at all.
  6. 95 — An embedded image failed to decode or render (only checked with --debug).

number 95 is the sneaky one, it only shows up with --debug, iykyk 😭

🎀 FILES 🎀

  • ~/.config/wxMaxima.conf — The personal wxMaxima initialization file, where user-specific settings are stored.
  • ~/.maxima/wxmaxima-init.mac — If the Maxima user directory — usually ~/.maxima/ — contains a text file named wxmaxima-init.mac, the contents of the file are passed to Maxima automatically every time a new worksheet has been started. 🦋

🙈 BUGS 🙈

if you find a bug in wxMaxima, please report it in the wxMaxima bug database 💜

(Please check first, if it was not already reported.) And if you have a fix, that would be great. wxMaxima is an open-source project, where you can contribute 🫶

and here's the crucial tea: if the issue is a mathematical bug, it might be a bug in Maxima (the backend, which does the mathematical computations), not wxMaxima (the graphical frontend). know the difference bestie 💅

The Maxima bug database is available at Sourceforge 🌸

👑 AUTHORS 👑

  • J. Rafael Rodriguez Galvan (Debian project), original author of the manual page
  • Gunter Königsmann (wxMaxima project)
  • Wolfgang Dautermannn (wxMaxima project)

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU General Public License, Version 2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation.

🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

and that's the whole page bestie!! go forth and compute 💖✨

sign-off: this was wxMaxima 26.10.0, dated 1980-01-01 — yes the date is silly, we love her for it 🎀💜

📦 where this page comes from