Sage Usability Improvements

This is an official wish list for development mainly on the Sage notebook in the near future. Please feel free to add or clarify ideas, link to trac tickets, make comments, reorganize items, point out useful links, etc.

Documentation

Notebook

Admin

I managed to do a little of this by exporting the directory that the
notebook is running in via NFS to the other machines and maintaining
the same permissions and file structure for everything else.  However,
this raised another issue in that not all my machines are of
comparable power.  How complicated would it be to add something that
allows you to balance how many processes go to each server?  I'm
thinking something along the lines of distcc's host list.

> We have a small server and would like provide SAGE (in form of the
> notebook) for the students. However, it maybe a bit
> "risky" (especially, we have no experts to manage it) to open it up to
> everyone. So we would like to have some kind of "account approval"
> procedure. Can that be done, if so how?

Users

It's easy to understand what do "return"

And now I only use Alt-return and Backspace. I feel it's also possible
to use Ctrl-return and Ctrl-backspace.

A splash-screen at the very beginning of sage session with only the most
useful key may be nice.

return = creates a newline inside a cell
alt-return = evaluates a cell and creates a new one
backspace = erases an empty-cell
ctrl-backspace = joins this cell to the previous one

See this for some excellent ideas from Jason Grout: http://groups.google.com/group/sage-support/browse_thread/thread/c29abdaaa4f0ee13 

A preliminary patch for this is available at
http://www.math.leidenuniv.nl/~wpalenst/sage/account_tokens.patch . It is a
patch against 4.1.1 with tickets 4552
('trac_4552-notebook_account_email.patch'), 6843, 6856 applied.

(TODO: add doctests, implement token-generation page to the interface added by
ticket 4135, allow enabling/disabling the token feature from that page too.)

Build / Test