Since around the year 2010, in the academic context of courses related to Control Systems at our universities, GNU Octave has been adopted as a simulation tool with a didactic focus. As this tool evolved, we paralleled its progress by developing didactic objects to enhance our teaching activities at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

In this journey, aiming to enrich our students’ experience, we initiated an investigation into how to develop graphical interfaces that would facilitate interaction with the created didactic objects. The initial approach involved creating graphical applications using the Qt framework. These applications, interacting with the user, executed processing in GNU Octave, collected the results, and presented them in graphical interfaces.

Although this improvement in user experience was evident, we encountered various limitations, particularly concerning the distribution of applications across different operating systems. For this reason, and considering that GNU Octave introduced the ability to represent visual controls through the uicontrol function, we began exploring an implementation that would allow visual representations in an editor capable of automatically generating script applications.

The early versions of this editor (now guiEditor) were designed to allow the creation of a single dialog window with basic controls and the inclusion of calls to other functions as part of a library. As we transitioned our previous work to this new tool, additional questions arose: Could we incorporate multiple windows? How could we add script files with functions? And more intriguingly, how could we structure an application with all these elements that could also generate a package for distribution on different systems?

This work, undertaken over the past 15 years, has positioned guiEditor as a mature tool. However, far from concluding its development, we are diligently working to incorporate new features that enable the realization of more complex projects.