mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[Daniele Pighin <address@hidden>]

Alle 11:35, sabato 8 febbraio 2003, Joris van der Hoeven ha scritto:

> I agree, but this takes quite a lot of time. I am willing to encapsulate
> the current interface in a clean and abstract 'TMGUI API'. Then you may
> implement as many specific GUI's (Qt, Gtk, whatever) as you want.

That is even better, which is what the LyX team did.

> Also, Dan Martens is writing a Windows port for the current interface.
> Porting TeXmacs to Windows is a higher priority as porting TeXmacs to
> other toolkits. As soon as we will have a good Windows port,
> then the task of ports to other GUI's will therefore become
> less urgent for us. Indeed, one of the major reasons for
> using other GUI's was portability.

I think this issue should be conditional to the previous one.
Once you have an interface independent solution, the interface is nothing 
more 
than a plugin.

> I agree (although some of this behaviour might have to be selected
> in the user preferences). Notice however that some of these things
> might easily be implemented in the current GUI too.

Yes, but there's (almost) nobody who will.

> Secondly, I don't like the work, so I prefer others to do the job.

Is there someone who can/wants to?

> And finally, many users expect other improvements in TeXmacs
> than user interface stuff.

Agreed, I myself think that the most needed feature in TeXmacs is a good 
support for floats.
Still, the point is always the same: if the toolkit was a known, easy and 
well 
documented one you could concentrate on the internals, and there would be 
others taking care of the gui (as there is people who loves tweaking widgets 
rather than dealing with algorithms).

> It is not clear though that such an investment would attract so many
> new developers. GUI interface design is *not* the part of TeXmacs
> where help is need most urgently. We rather need good documentation,
> more and better connections to extern software, better style files, etc.
> Each of these issues is independent from the GUI.

I wouldn't say so.
If texmacs was standard-compliant it would be shipped with more 
distributions, 
more users would be attracted, and among these there would very likely be 
someone who would like to help, both for UI and internals stuff.
Not being integrated with existing desktop environments is something that 
prevent many from using it.

> This is precisely a thing I want to avoid, because these tools
> have less structure than the approach used in TeXmacs.

agreed, it was an option :)

Thanks for your attention

Daniele