mailing-list for TeXmacs Users

[Giovanni Piredda <address@hidden>]

Am 01.06.2019 um 22:22 schrieb Amir Michail:
> People in academia care more about appearances than being correct about the 
> superiority of a tool. They don’t want to jeopardize important academic 
> connections.
>
> Marketing TeXmacs as “forbidden fruit” and providing an emergency LaTeX 
> editing mode might get it more attention among academics.
>
> Amir

Hi again,

I am not convinced of the basis of your argument ("People in academia 
care more about appearances than being correct about the superiority of 
a tool ") but you and I could have different experiences. Let us admit 
for the sake of the argument that things are as you say. In this case my 
feelings would be against helping people who have this problem: let them 
sort it out by themselves.

I agree on another thing that is implicit in your message (and in other 
messages that you write before if I recall well): it is necessary to 
figure out what is hampering the diffusion of TeXmacs. I expect 
developers to have a bit of a collection of reasons given to them by 
people on why they prefer LaTeX to TeXmacs. I guess that one is that 
LaTeX is established, and TeXmacs is not; so when you have to write an 
article or a thesis, with LaTeX you are guaranteed that you have what 
you need (with TeXmacs you have to figure it out first).

From my point of view, I know what I would like to have: a system to do 
structured writing where I can easily read what I am writing. Moreover, 
I would like to have it programmable (and extensible) with a language 
that is easy to grasp at first sight; and made so that different 
packages can easily be compatible with each other. Finally, when it 
fails it should issue error messages that can help you find the problem 
with your input.
With TeXmacs it is possible to read what you are writing while you are 
writing it, so that is very good. I am trying to gather a bit of 
experience in programming it, I do not know yet enough to have an 
opinion on this aspect of things.

Giovanni