Best practices.

[Observatorio-de-Matematica]

Good practices for management of Maxima-related files.

An easy way to look for packages that come with a Maxima distribution is with the file_search function.
Related to file_search function, there are, among others, file_search_maxima, file_search_lisp, and file_search_demo; these are lists of paths in which Maxima searches for files with specific file extensions: mac, mc, and wxm for file_search_maxima; fasl, lisp, and lsp for file_search_lisp and dem, dm1, dm2, dm3, and dmt for file_search_demo.
A path or paths can be appended to these lists if files with the corresponding file extensions can be found in them.
Now, it is time to talk about the file extensions in which the frontends of Maxima usually save.

• wxMaxima uses the extensions wxm and wxmx (the first to save the inputs and the second to save the state -inputs and outputs-), the first can be read in a browser or in GitHub, and the second one can not.
• Xmaxima uses the extensions mac, mc, dem and lisp (the first three to save the inputs and the last to save the state -inputs and outputs-); all these extensions can be read in a browser or in GitHub (perhaps dem fails to be read in a browser). In Xmaxima one have to write the name of the file with the corresponding extension (in wxMaxima is automatic, at least in Windows).

The Maxima packages are written usually in files with mac or lisp extensions, so is recommended to save them via Xmaxima (can be done with wxMaxima or CLI, but can be confusing to some people).

Good practices for sessions

• Avoid unnecessary calls to the kill function.
• Can be evaluated from beginning to end.

P.D.

• I have noticed that trying to paste from a wxMaxima session to an XMaxima session does not work well (at least in Windows). One can write a package from scratch, but I don't know now how to paste from other documents.
• I also noticed that wxMaxima allows to export as .html, .mac or .tex