mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[Henri Lesourd <address@hidden>]

Yann Dirson wrote:

> Hi Henri,
>
>  
>
> > Do you remember some episode, or some of their criticisms
> > that could give us more clue about precise features which
> > they found difficult to grasp, and therefore should be
> > considered as difficult to grasp for newcomers ?
> >    
>
> One thing I find terribly annoying myself is the meta/alt modifiers
> documented for shortcuts not working out of the box, thus needing
> tweeking in texmacs configuration.  Not sure a newbie would even
> understand what those "mod<N>" refer to, and I am myself puzzled at
> why there seem to be 2 sets of settings like A -> mod1 and alt -> A.
>
>  
Its clear that nobody understands these things (and even those
who understand would prefer to forget them forever ;-).

It would be better to hide these completely uninteresting X-Windows
peculiarities, but the problem on the other hand is that if we do
this, the user loses control on the interface, and it would probably
be worse, because then we are dependent on the many ways the windows
manager allows the users to deal with this.

Thus I don't see a solution which would be clearly better than the
current one for this particular item.


> Maybe texmacs could query the X server about modifiers ?  Not sure how
> much information can be gathered from there, though...
>
>  
It does queries the X server (I'm not completely sure about that). As
far as I know, these menus are if you want to redefine how X-Windows
itself deals with how the special keys are allocated.


> Being an occasional texmacs user, I often find myselft wondering about
> things I'm sure I had found about the previous time.  Eg, as user of a
> french keyboard, I often find myself wondering whether I'm supposed to
> use "shift" as part of a modified keystroke that involves a number.
>
> I am also occasionally having doubts about the math-font switching:
> when switched (eg. to blackboard bold) I usually try a couple of
> keystrokes to check the font - and quite unexpectedly the set of chars
> is just displayed in roman...  Wouldn't it make sense to suppress this
> behaviour when a special font has been selected ?
>
>  
For this I don't know, I'm not a LaTeX specialist myself (what should
be the right behaviour in LaTeX for this ?).


> While testing before writing down this mail, I also stumbled on a
> strange behaviour, which looks quite confusing, and possibly buggy: if
> I start a new doc, switch to "article" style, and start creating a
> section (A-S-1 on my french keyboard), it seems to be creating much
> more than a simple header, which is not terminated by the 1st newline,
> and I cannot seem to be able to create other sections.  No problem if
> I create a document title first, though.
>
>  
It is possible that the stylesheets are a little bit buggy these days,
but this problem is an easy one, which will be probably be solved in
the next release.