How to get Octave's plot to work under emacs?

Question

Using octave in a terminal window

x=1:10;
plot(x);

works fine, produces a plot window which is zoomable etc.

running octave under emacs, the plot appears, but the plot window is hung and you can't zoom. If you execute plot(x); again, the window disappears.

I'm using Debian Jessie, with GNU Emacs 24.3.1 and GNU Octave, version 3.8.1.

To get it to work at all I had to make a .octaverc to set the prompt.

$ cat ~/.octaverc
PS1(">> ")

Answer 1

It seems that the problem is caused by octave-mode running octave with the no-line-editing switch. You can just hack this out of the compiled lisp file and everything works fine!

On my system:

cd /usr/share/emacs/24.4/lisp/progmodes
sudo vi octave.elc

change --no-line-editing to --line-editing directly in the .elc file

restart emacs and everything should be fine.