mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[Alfe <address@hidden>]

Hi, everybody ...

I've been running into a problem using TeXmacs.  First, everything worked 
perfect, I tried out the program and started writing a documentation for 
one of our software products with it.

During writing it, I once encountered a strange problem:  Right after 
opening the editor, moving the mouse into the window removed it from my 
desktop.  No sign of a crash (any signal).  Running TeXmacs in strace 
showed that the program terminated by calling _exit(0).

After testing around a little, the problem was gone without a trace and 
leaving me no clue about its origin.  At least I could go on working with 
TeXmacs; I refrained from experimenting with wild clicking orgies and 
stuff to see if I could reproduce the effect because going on writing had 
priority then.

Now, after a reboot of my machine, I am not able to start up the TeXmacs 
with my written document.  Sometimes starting up the TeXmacs without any 
document produces a well-designed window which pops away as soon as I 
touch it with the mouse or click anything in it.  Sometimes the thing is a 
little more stable, but the window _always_ disappears when I load my 
file, set it to shrinking factor 6 (which is most comfortable for me) and 
start scrolling in the file.

I found out now that not the whole program is terminating when the window 
disappears, but that one window is shutting down.  If it is the only one, 
the program terminates of course.  But if I manage to open further windows 
(via clone view or similar) before the only first window disappears, then 
the remaining windows usually (not always) stay open and even the buffer 
displayed in the window which disappears is still available in the other 
windows.

I have tried this on several hosts, under several user ids (i.e. a 
colleage of mine also encountered the phenomenon) and with several 
versions of TeXmacs (namely 1.0.3 and 1.0.5).  I tried RPM packages as 
well as source tar balls (which compiled without any problem).  I removed 
my ~/.TeXmacs/ directory several times to make sure nothing poisonous was 
left in there.

I always tried this on SuSE Linux machines (9.1, 8.0).  Once I tried it on 
Redhat and got an instant segfault (probably due to incompatible thread 
libraries).  We don't really use any other distribution but SuSE, so my 
options are limited.

I'm surprised that nobody seems to have noticed the problem which is now 
about to kill the work I have done by typing the documentation in TeXmacs.

TeXmacs is a great program with a very nice approach and I like the look 
and feel by now.  But this ugly bug makes me think it wasn't a good 
choice, being not stable enough for larger documents :-/

Please show me that I'm wrong.  Any ideas?

                                        Alfe
   ____    ________
  /___/   /___/___  http://www.alfe.de,  address@hidden,  Alfe @ Tubmud
 /___/___/___/___   Alexander Fetke, Bruno-Taut-Ring 5b, 12359 Berlin
/   /___/   /___    +49 173 6073521, +49 30 60109906, +49 30 44030634