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TeXmacs evolution


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  • From: Daniele Pighin <address@hidden>
  • To: address@hidden
  • Subject: TeXmacs evolution
  • Date: Fri, 7 Feb 2003 17:08:00 +0100

Hi there,
my humble try to revive a flamy topic :)

I've been discussing on this point on the wiki about an year ago, but taking
a
look at the new LyX relase (1.3.0) I think this is now more actual than
ever.The most relevant change in 1.3 is that they have finally fully ported
the UI to the Qt toolkit.

I know that there's some work in progress for porting TeXmacs to another
toolkit, but what I want to say in this message is that it should really be a
priority, for two reasons especially:

- the trivial reason is that it would make TeXmacs integrate into a user's
desktop environment (which is not that trivial, in the end; think of drag and
drop issues, for example);
- the very important reason is that there are *many* {Qt|gtk+2|Wxgtk..}
programmers, while there is really *few* who can program using texmacs' own
toolkit.

This is a crucial point as TeXmacs is far superior to any other editor I've
ever used in the field of output quality and text rendering (plus it has many
unique features, such its integration with so many scientific software), but
it really lacks a usable interface.

Speaking about usability, TeXmacs (absolutely?) needs:
- popup windows for confirmations and so on
- popup dialogs for configuring user options and preferences, page layout,
and
so on
- dialogs to do customization things, such as visually edit a style, header
and footer, choose what kind of numeration to use via an explicative UI ...
- mouse-less editing (this is __very__ important)
- ... I could go on for a while

All this features could be contributed by other programmers if they knew
where
to put their hands.

So I ask wether wouldn't it be possible to feature-freeze texmacs for a while
and concentrate on the port to another (modern, widely-used,
easily-accessible) toolkit?
How don't know how many *active* programmers are there at the moment, but I
guess the task couldn't take much longer than a couple of months, even having
a small team working on it.

This would allow many users to contribute their own code, what they now won't
do as they don't want to invest time learning how to use a toolkit they're
not going to use somewhere else.

Moreover, there are tools such as glade (gtk) or qt-designer (Qt) that would
let you and any other programmer tweak the interface quite easily.

These things have surely been discussed many times on the developers ML, but
I'd also love to hear the users' impressions.

I've seen many people sticking to other software (say, LyX) just because of
its cleaner and more standard interface (the xforms interface was better than
texmacs' one as well), or dropping the use of TeXmacs because it is somewhat
weird (it's not a matter of key-shortcuts, but the average user is upset by
the absence of configuration windows and so on)... while we all know that
texmacs can rock.

So, let's make it rock :)

Daniele

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