mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[Lukasz Stafiniak <address@hidden>]

On Sun, Mar 4, 2012 at 7:40 PM, Chris Austin <address@hidden> wrote:
> For rapidly building a new formula by copying and pasting parts of old 
> formulae, it would often be very useful to be able to turn off "intelligent 
> selection", so that, for example, the selection does not spring to include 
> a matching right parenthesis if you select a left parenthesis, or the 
> right-hand side of an equation if you select the left-hand side and the = 
> sign, or the whole of a floating-point number if you select some of its 
> digits.  Is there a way to do this in recent versions?  I can't find any 
> way to turn off "intelligent selection" in 1.0.7.10.

I'll let seasoned TeXmacs'ers provide a constructive answer and just
mention, that with semantic constructs it is "easier said than done".
TeXmacs has recently become more of a
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_editor. You should look at your
formulas when Document->Style->source is selected. You could rebind
your keys to insert raw symbols rather than whole semantic constructs
(there is no option to achieve that AFAIK) but you would lose the
benefits of having structure. It is possible to get even more support
for structural editing with
Edit->Preferences->Mathematics->Semantics->Semantic editing, but it's
not clear to me what it does :-)

The idealistic goal is for every displayed character or formatting to
be a rendition of the intended meaning, and to represent the meaning
directly in the document. The road to this goal can be painful. For
example, I considered implementing the \code construct for some new
languages, but I quickly resigned because (a) it would be an awful
amount of work, (b) I would lose some editing and displaying
flexibility, (c) I wouldn't gain anything since I edit the code
samples outside of TeXmacs and I'm interested in quickly and nicely
presenting them on slides, (with additional explanations next to or
over the code added in TeXmacs).

Best.