3 Entering commands

Most commonly, you will enter Maxima commands in the last input line that appears on the text Window. That text will be rendered in green. If you press enter, without having written a command-termination character (either ‘;’ or ‘$’) at the end, the text will remain green and you can continue to write a multi-line command. When you type a command-end character and press the enter key, the text will become blue and a response from Maxima should appear in black. You can also use the key combination Ctrl-j to move to a new line without sending the input for Maxima evaluation yet. If you want to clear all the current input (in green), even if it spans several lines, use the key combination Ctrl-u.

If you move the cursor over the (%i1) input label, or any other label or output text (in black), you will not be able to type any text there; that feature will prevent you from trying to enter a command in the wrong place, by mistake. If you really want to insert some additional text to modify Maxima’s output, and which will not be interpreted by Maxima, you can do that using cut and paste (we will cover that later).

You can also write a new input command for Maxima on top of a previous input line (in blue), for instance, if you do not want to write down again everything but just want to make a slight change. Once you press the enter key, the text you modified will appear at the last input line, as if you had written it down there; the input line you modified will continue the same in Xmaxima’s and Maxima’s memory, in spite of having changed in the screen.

For example, suppose you entered ‘a: 45;’ in input line (%i1), and something else in (%i2). You then move up over the (%i1) a: 45; and change the 5 for an 8. Once you press enter, you will have in the screen (%i1) a: 48; and (%i3) a: 48;. But if you write, in the current input line, (%i1) the original input ‘a: 45;’ will reappear. If you navigate through the input lines history (see next section), you will also see that the first input keeps its original value.