Provide light version for use with existing Sage installation

[slel]

That would be a very light app wrapper that would
use an existing Sage installation.

It could prompt the user to enter the path to the Sage
installation they wish to use, or depend on finding
a sage executable in the user's PATH.

[culler]

I think something like that could be built fairly easily as a bundled tkinter app.

I am wondering what the purpose of such an app would be. In other words, what features of such an app would make it be an improvement over simply opening a terminal and running sage with appropriate options?

[culler]

Just to expand a bit on my previous comment, the aspect of the current app which I see as being most valuable is that it follows Apple's paradigm of making an app be completely self-contained. Installation means dragging the bundle to the /Applications folder; removal means dragging the bundle to the trash. The app itself can reliably assume that the structure of the bundle is known and that fact also makes codesigning possible. The codesigning in turn avoids the annoying issues that Apple creates when installing unsigned apps.

Once you abandon that paradigm, the maintenance problem becomes one of attempting to anticipate all of the idiosyncratic modifications that a user may have created when building, installing or expanding their sage installation. That job seems prone to failure and not very much fun.

[slel]

I was thinking of novice users who

• need a fuller Sage than provided by the app
• with some guidance, install such a fuller Sage
• after that, prefer launching Jupyter via the app
  than by typing commands in a terminal

But your explanations make a lot of sense.

I guess nteract is another option for such users,
as it lets one open .ipynb files by double-click.

[kcrisman]

I guess nteract is another option for such users, as it lets one open .ipynb files by double-click.

This was one of the great features of the "old" Mac app; it allowed people to use .sws and .ipynb files as they would any other on a Mac. Of course, I'm unsure how hard it would be to provide this with the new setup.

On a related note (I can open a new issue if need be) would be the possibility of having a menu icon available along the top and/or leaving Sage "open" after a Terminal is opened. After all, one might want to have several different Sage terminals open at once (if one didn't want to use a notebook).

[NathanDunfield]

On a related note (I can open a new issue if need be) would be the possibility of having a menu icon available along the top and/or leaving Sage "open" after a Terminal is opened. After all, one might want to have several different Sage terminals open at once (if one didn't want to use a notebook).

One reason for the current "launcher-only" design of the SageMath.app is to avoid confusing the user about which application actually owns the Sage terminals/notebooks. If it kept running after launch, people would click the SageMath icon in the false hope of raising their terminal/notebook windows and think they can shut down the terminals/notebook server by quitting the SageMath app.

Any user sophisticated enough to want more than a couple terminal windows is likely to start Sage by getting a new window in Terminal.app and typing "sage" anyway.

[kcrisman]

Any user sophisticated enough to want more than a couple terminal windows is likely to start Sage by getting a new window in Terminal.app and typing "sage" anyway.

Hmm, good point. I'll note that the old app menu item just provided an easy place to (re)launch notebook or terminal, and didn't seem to cause the confusion you mention - but I agree than anything that appears in the Dock would definitely cause that confusion.