Hi everyone. I have used sage for some time and it was really useful
in calculus and algebra though I made heavy use of it to deal with
matrices operations and in my opinion the process of inputting (create/
edit) matrices could be made faster and less error-prone.

The standard way to input matrices is to do:

m=matrix([[row1:col1,row1:col2,...],[row2:col1,row2:col2,...],...])

This is perfectly fine if you are using small matrices or only using 7
or 8 of them but if you need to double-check your . calculations and
have to create a lot of matrices this becomes cumbersome, tiring and
error-prone. It's easy to forget a comma, etc.

So I suggest that a "gui" matrix editor should be available. You would
press a button, choose the number of rows and columns and then you
would just input your values like an excel sheet. After exiting, the
matrix is dumped from the visual format to the
[[row1:col1,row1:col2,...],[row2:col1,row2:col2,...],...] format
directly in the worksheet.

Since we're editing matrices we can make some assumptions to improve
the workflow: You are always in "edit-mode" so you can type in the
selected cell or move between cells but only if you press enter does
the typed phrase get accepted into the selected cell. Also, when you
press enter, the cursor skips to the next cell. The next cell is
always to the right of the active one unless we're in the last column
and in that case we jump to the first cell of the first line.

I have made a small C program for linux (porting to windows is still
on the way) that does what I'm saying but is not integrated with sage:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/matrixstudio/

So you launch the program, set the dimensions of the matrix, fill it
out and press END. Now just press Ctrl+v in sage and the matrix
appears magically converted (if you have installed xclip).


Best regards, Alberto

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