Starting a Maple Session

How to start a Maple session varies somewhat in different enviroments. On the Windows machines, you can usually either start Maple by selecting the option from the start menu, or by finding the appropriate icon (it usually looks like a Maple leaf) and clicking the mouse on it. In a Unix environment, there may be an icon or menu item for Maple; you can usually always just issue the command xmaple & or maple -x & to start it.

Figure 1: A newly-opened Maple worksheet.

After a brief pause, you should see a window that looks similar to that in Figure 1; this is Maple's graphical (or worksheet) interface, where you will type your commands and see the results. We will go into more details of the worksheet interface in §3. As in the figure, you're session may have started with two windows open inside the main Maple window. The one in front in Figure 1 is a help window; we'll come back to this in §3.3. But for now, let's concentrate on a worksheet where we can enter some Maple commands. The top part of this window should look something^1.1 like this:

This window is a Maple worksheet, and is a place to enter your Maple commands. For now, click on the button which maximizes the current worksheet; this is on right side of the worksheet's title bar, and looks like .^1.2Clicking the mouse on this should make the worksheet fill most of the Maple window.

Most users typically use the Maple's graphical, or worksheet, interface; this is what starts you add the -x to the maple command in Unix. However, there is also a text-based interface, which you might see if you just type maple, omitting the -x.

    |\^/|     Maple V Release 5.1 (SUNY Stony Brook)
._|\|   |/|_. Copyright (c) 1981-1998 by Waterloo Maple Inc. All rights
 \  MAPLE  /  reserved. Maple and Maple V are registered trademarks of
 <____ ____>  Waterloo Maple Inc.
      |       Type ? for help.
>

This interface is useful when you want to run Maple in a non-graphic environment; for example, over a dial-up connection. However, keep in mind that while all the usual Maple commands work, this interface is much more limited-- it is difficult to edit your commands or save your work, and graphic commands such as plot are much more limited. If you get into this mode by mistake, you can just type the Maple command quit; to exit.

Footnotes

... something^1.1

This particular image was made on a computer running Unix. Under Microsoft Windows or on a Macintosh, the symbols around at the edges will be slightly different, but with similar functions.

....^1.2

Again, if you are running another type of computer, the button may look a little different. For example, under MS-Windows, it looks similar to this: figure=ws-winmax.ps,height=2ex.