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
:-)