I beg to differ. TeXmacs needs a lot of users.

I tried to release Xmacs based on TeXmacs and selled the services (binaries, remote aid) to the TeXmacs users in China. The users varies from high school students to professors.

One of the high school students knows nothing about command line. For Chinese users, we have to install the fandol fonts to the dir: $HOME/.TeXmacs/font/truetype . The `.TeXmacs` folder is hidden. And he does not known how to put the fonts into the correct path. And he also don't know how to launch TeXmacs from the command line with the `--delete-font-cache` option. But he is a TeXmacs user. We talked with each other using a Zoom like app, he shared his screen with me, and I helped him to complete the required steps to use TeXmacs as a Chinese user.

In my opinion, TeXmacs is an evolution from Emacs. In TeXmacs, we can use Scheme to write a friendly widget to complete a task(configuration/edit/others). We can use Scheme, but users do not need to know about scheme to use TeXmacs.

For `--delete-font-cache`, I wrote a menu entry to complete the task, see:

https://savannah.gnu.org/patch/?9990

The patch only removes the related files. And we could make it better using Scheme:

+ After deleting the related files, prompt a dialog and let users to choose whether to restart TeXmacs (or rebuild the font cache) to make it work.

+ Another menu entry to scan the .TeXmacs/fonts folder to add the fonts

+ Even more, a menu entry to install the fonts and add the font to the metadata in one click

Users are always good or smart enough to use TeXmacs. And TeXmacs should be better and smarter.

---- On Tue, 2020-12-01 07:20:51 Massimiliano Gubinelli <address@hidden> wrote ----

Personally,

I do not think TeXmacs need a lot of users. It needs *good users*, *smart users*, *users which want to spend some time contributing to the project in some way*, *users that are willing to help improving the program*.

Typical LaTeX users, especially those which are not able to understand manuals, and just copy things out of stackexchange, can remain there were they are. :) They certainly didn't made LaTeX what is now and will not in any way make a better environment for TeXmacs.

Give us the Lamports, the Hoenigs, the Rahtz, the Spivaks, the Tantaus, please. :)

Max


> On 30. Nov 2020, at 21:15, Amir Michail <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> The idea is to have the user run a TeXmacs scan on some of their LaTeX documents.
>
> From this scan, TeXmacs would generate a subset of its manual that explains how to write those LaTeX documents in TeXmacs.
>
> In this way, if the user is using LaTeX in a basic way, then the TeXmacs manual would be short and relevant to that basic usage.
>
> This might encourage more people to switch to TeXmacs because learning it would not take much time for their usage.
>
> Amir
>