Re: [Texmacs-dev] XEmbed, TeXmacs and Toolkits

[Joris van der Hoeven]

On Wed, Mar 07, 2007 at 03:21:04AM -0600, Juan Pablo Romero Méndez wrote:
> Have anyone seen this?
> 
> http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Standards/xembed-spec
> 
> "XEmbed is a protocol that uses basic X mechanisms such as client
> messages and reparenting windows to provide embedding of a control
> from one application into another application."

Thanks for the pointer; I'll study this.

> I don't know how difficult would be for texmacs to support this
> protocol (or if it already does), but in any case It could be good a
> starting point for porting texmacs to other toolkits.

I definitely want to support other backends than X and will be working
on this during 2007.

> If texmacs could be started with only the main (document) window,
> without any decorations at all, and provided hooks existed that could
> be called from another process, it would be relatively easy to start a
> "wrapper" application in some toolkit, say, Qt4, that implements the
> GUI.
> 
> I'd say that much more people knows how to code in one of the usual
> toolkits than in texmacs's. I personally would be glad to code some
> dialogs, but right now I feel somewhat alienated by the lack of a tool
> like gtk's glade or qt's designer.

At the moment, I have started to implement TeXmacs markup for GUI elements
(see some of the previous messages on the mailing list). About 1/3 of the work
has been completed, but I have to do some other things next two months.

The philosophy is to have a clean markup for defining the GUI,
together with a default implementation on top of nothing,
which can be overidden by other toolkits.

Notice that the approach both allows you to program widgets using
a Scheme API *and* to use the editor for designing widgets.
The advantage of TeXmacs markup is that it can be mixed with
any other type of TeXmacs markup (the latter might not work
in the case of other toolkit back-ends, of course).

Best wishes, Joris