mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[Jay Belanger <address@hidden>]

(Disclaimer:  I'm a die-hard Emacs/LaTeX user.
If some of my answers are off, I'm sure I'll be corrected...)

"B. Joshua Rosen" <address@hidden> writes:

...
> So is Texmacs based on emacs or not? Is it the intention of the
> developers to make it emacs compatible or is Texmacs just it's own
> thing?

TeXmacs was inspired by Emacs, but is not intended to be Emacs
compatible.
It's worth noting that TeXmacs uses guile as its extension language,
the long term plans for Emacs is to migrate to guile.

> I was dearly hoping for a version of Emacs that could do word
> processing.

Emacs is supposed to get more and more word processing capabilities. 
But it won't be doing any word processing in the near future.

> All of the open source word processing projects are
> producing forth rate Word clones. 

Good point.  They seem to be trying to make it easy for Word users to
migrate (which may be a worthwhile goal).  It's possible, too, that a
lot of the developers happen to think that Word has done it right...

> At there current stage of development
> none are usable. For example Abiword can't seem to render a font to save
> it's life. Even if projects like Abiword and Star Office succeed you
> won't have anything better than Word so you might as well continue to
> use the real thing and run Word on Win4Lin. On the other hand an Emacs
> that could handle word processing task would be orders of magnitude
> better than Word and it would also be something that truly belongs in
> the *Nix world.

Why would it have to be Emacs, specifically?
If you're willing to leave Emacs, then TeXmacs is the choice for word
processing. 

Jay