Creating sessions

A session can be started from the Insert→Session menu. A session consists of a sequence of input and output fields and possible text between them. When pressing return inside an input field of a session, the text inside the environment is evaluated and the result is displayed in an output field.

When entering a command in a session, the application attempts to execute it. Several commands may be launched concurrently in the same document, but the output will only be active in the session where the cursor is and at the place of the cursor. Therefore, we recommend to use different buffers for parallel executions.

For each type of extern application, one may choose between sharing a single process by different sessions, or launching a separate process for each different session. More precisely, when inserting a session using Insert→Session→Other, you may specify both a “session type” (Shell, Pari, Maxima, etc.) and a “session name” (the default name is “default”). Sessions with different names correspond to different processes and sessions with the same name share a common process.

In order to finish the process which underlies a given session, you may use Session→Close session. When pressing return in the input of a non-connected system, the system will be restarted automatically. You may also use Session→Interrupt execution in order to interrupt the execution of a command. However, several applications do not support this feature.