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
:-)