mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[Massimiliano Gubinelli <address@hidden>]

Dear Giovanni,

 the points you make below are quite sensible. Inclusion in major Linux distribution is blocked by the current impossibility to switch to Guile 2, this require nontrivial developer work which so far has not been undertaken. Some low level parts of TeXmacs scheme code have to be rewritten and we would very much appreciate help from people versed in Guile 2.

For the rest I think that a better and more user friendly way to share knowledge about TeXmacs would be to have our own stackexchange section. In my experience this is the place where I find very useful and up to date LaTeX informations (how to do something, which are the packages more appropriate to some task, etc…).

It would allow to create a shared knowledgebase which is better structured and more reliable than digging the mail archives (IMHO)

Max

 

On 26. Mar 2019, at 22:08, Giovanni Piredda <address@hidden> wrote:

I find TeXmacs a wonderful program.

It is quite possible that its success will be determined by how many users and developers it will be able to attract (someone I have been discussing with told it to me, and I think it is a sensible statement). For this reason, I think the ideas I am going to list here are worth discussing, as they may help attracting users and developers; maybe some of them have already been considered and rejected, or considered and will be implemented - I do not know. They are important to me because I would like to invest my energies in writing using TeXmacs with the idea in mind that I will be able to edit them in the future with a new version of TeXmacs. Of course I know that whatever I write, I will be able to use in the future too if I save a copy, say, in LaTeX; having the idea that it will continue working in TeXmacs itself is an additional help for the confidence.

Here they are. With of course the necessary IMHO in front of everything.

- TeXmacs should be re-inserted in the repositories of all major Linux distributions. I know that it is not in Ubuntu, and I suspect that this is because it is based on Guile 1.8. Because of this, I suspect too that this is already considered and it will be done :-) But I list it here all the same. Being able to install things with a click makes it easy to try things out and so on.

- The archives of the mailing list would need, IMHO, a slightly more wieldy search interface. I tried it and it works nicely, but there is something a bit off with it. Perhaps it is just the matter of tuning the default appearance of some elements: for example, a larger panel with larger font size for the search, the menu for selecting the year range a bit easier to use; the results presented in pages and with just the titles and the first few words (so that they are easier to evaluate at a glance). And maybe the possibility of ordering the results by "relevance" (with a good definition of "relevance") could also be nice - of course this could mean using a different search engine.

-- Yet for what regards the archives of the mailing list, the list of messages could appear immediately, without pressing the button "I'm not a spammer", which as far as I can see has no function; yet again with different defaults (larger font, messages should maybe be on the foreground rather than the grid with years and months)

- A standard way for users to exchange style files and macros would be helpful. Now of course everyone is free to post their macros in the mailing list. What would help, in my opinion, is an organized place where one can go and look for macros. Like CTAN for LaTeX. If this is at the moment too expensive to organize, a temporary solution could be thought of. Maybe through GitHub (where there are the TeXmacs repositories) or through some feature of the mailing list. This seems to me very, very helpful, the more helpful the more it is working without supervision - as I think it could have an avalanche effect. To convince oneself, one can think about the LaTeX packages that he likes and uses, and the ones he does not use but finds attractive too ... (for examples of both kinds in my case: booktabs, siunitx, chemfig, mhchem - I had a look at it just now - tikz, pgfplots, fancyhdr, geometry, listings, cleveref)

- Screenshots of the current TeXmacs version appearing in a prominent place on the website. I think they help convincing people to try the program. The program itself does the rest of the convincing.

- Perhaps making it clear that, since one is able to save one's work in LaTeX, whatever one writes will be available to them in the future too (as long as LaTeX is still there, and we can be confident about that I think); so the time spent writing in TeXmacs is well invested for sure: one has *now* the ease and comfort of use of TeXmacs and the stability of LaTeX.

Ok, I am pretty aware that I have just arrived here. If it helps, it helps, if not ... not :-)