TeXmacs is attractive to those that are willing to put some effort into learning and working by doing some reading and actually putting the tool to work for producing documents relevant to their work. Unfortunately the reality is that increasingly users want matters to be "one-click" and are not as willing to take the time and make the effort to learn something new.

Several comments in messages preceding this one mentioned CAS and plug-ins, etc. This is a feature that sets TeXmacs apart in my opinion. These are not meant it seems to me to serve as interactive development interfaces for the relevant programs. Rather they are used to show formatted results in a technical document without cutting-and pasting. The relevant programs each have dedicated native environments used specifically for the purpose of interaction. It is probably too much to ask of TeXmacs and plug-in developers to match the capabilities of these dedicated programs given the diversity involved and the primary purpose of TeXmacs.

However, having said that a few of these plug-ins come close to providing what is available outside of TeXmacs. The Maxima plug-in is an example. While wxMaxima is a useful tool its documentation capabilities extend only to HTML and pdfLaTeX which must be manually coded into text cells. Most users are not going to learn either LaTeX or HTML and go through the labor in order to do this. wxMaxima in all practicality allows only unadorned textual comments. Using TeXmacs with the Maxima plug-in (which appears to be well-supported) is far superior for combining mathematical content with Maxima interaction.

I find the same to be true for using Python with NumPy, SciPy, Matplotlib, Scitools, etc. modules for numerical computation, although there are better interactive tools than TeXmacs for using scientific Python. I cannot say the same about the other TeXmacs plugins either because I have not tried them or because they have failed to work. For example, on Ubuntu GNU/Linux 12.04 with the latest TeXmacs package (v1.7.0.14) the Shell plug-in does not work (starts Dead) and this is not the bash-dash problem, because I have tried both linked to /bin/sh. It is something else and I do not have the time or know-how to fix it. Also, I have given up on the Octave plug-in. It seems that some have had success with getting this to work. But I tried it on MS Windows, Linux, and OS X and could not get it to work. It only works if no variables are used in an _expression_. Otherwise it merely returns the text string result "texmacs". I cannot recommend that anyone rely on the Octave plug-in, because it has a history of on-again, off-again support and reliability.

Like most good programs TeXmacs also has to contend with the issues involved in supporting Windows, OS X, and the many flavors of GNU/Linux. I have installed TeXmacs and Maxima and Octave using all three. By far GNU/Linux (I use Ubuntu) is the best in terms of reliability, support, integration, and ease of use. In short, making all these programs and their dependencies work well on these different operating systems can be a bucket of worms. I have developed an Lubuntu Linux VirtualBox virtual machine dedicated to TeXmacs and related mathematics software as an answer to this problem. It takes less than twenty minutes to download and install the VirtualBox host software that runs well on all three operating systems and to import (with one click) the virtual machine (OVA) file. My opinion is that this is the best way to deal with these interoperability  issues. I will post a link to the FTP URL when I get the files packaged together for proper distribution in the next couple of days for those that may be interested in this solution.

David E. Miller


On 2/28/2013 5:53 AM, Paul Zarucki wrote:

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