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Re: [TeXmacs] Two problems of TeXmacs (IMHO)


Chronological Thread 
  • From: Daniele Pighin <address@hidden>
  • To: address@hidden
  • Subject: Re: [TeXmacs] Two problems of TeXmacs (IMHO)
  • Date: Mon, 22 Dec 2003 10:33:44 +0100
[09:24, lunedì 22 dicembre 2003] - Jan Ulrich Hasecke ha scritto:

> And the TeXmacs-Community is too math-centric, so there are many
> plugins to use all kinds of math-software, but only some users are
> demanding and developing features as good gui, easy changeable
> style-files, fast navigation and so on. (Have you ever tried to
> correct a mispelled often used name in 20 included files? Have you
> ever tried to change section to subsection or vice versa?)

I tried to push this discussion about a year ago, but it wouldn't get much
attention.
I understand (and eventually agree) that extending TM features is utterly far
more "important" than GUI and make-up things, but my point is that

- TeXmacs community is too small and too-much of a math-focused one;
- We (as TM supporters) should do our best to widen this community, so that
more and more work-power can be profused in TM development, documentation
and contribution.

And to widen the user-base, the *KEY* points are (in order of importance, the
first and the second being important alike IMO):

- TM *needs* a port to some standard toolkit. This would allow for a better
desktop integration (that so far is almost absent), and would allow us to
have many more programmers joining the developers community. I would go QT,
as it is a state-of-the-art technology and would make porting to windows
almost painless, but any decent toolkit (QT, Gtk2, WX) would do the trick.
- TM file-format should *really* move to XML. I won't discuss this point,
as to me it is just obvious, and I still can't find a good reason not to do
it.
- Common tasks (such as document hierarcy reorganization, document
navigation...) need to have some sort of dialog/menu/automation, advanced
features shouldn't crowd the menus, hardening access to common used ones
and so on... in two words: GUI reorganization.
- Speed Enhancements.
- A *perfect*, convert-and-compile-the-dvi latex export filter, as LaTeX is
a de facto standard for scientific documents editing, and we can't go
without it.

I've already proposed to stop adding features for some months and concetrate
on these topics. Those who have been using TeXmacs without a plugin for the
XyZk software so far will keep using it, also if they have to wait a year or
two for their extension. On the other hand, there are thousands of potential
TM users out there who won't jump in just because TM is somewhat "scary", and
for an open source project like this user-base involvement *is* a key point
for success.

I do love TM, and I'd be glad if it had the success it deserves.

Daniele

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