[Texmacs-dev] Main roadmap for GUI reorganization

[Joris van der Hoeven]

Hi all,

Just for your knowledge, our plans for the GUI reorganization and
working towards Qt as the new graphical front-end, are as follows,
and to be implemented in this order:

1) Reorganization of the keyboard shortcuts and corresponding help,
   so as simulate native look and feel on all platforms. (Mainly finished).

2) Reorganization of menus and icon bars. I just started working on this;
   several things will need to be added both on the X11 and Qt side.
   The main novelty will be the use of the "focus" (most of the time:
   the innermost tag) for many editing operations and a top level menu
   and icon bar corresponding to the focus. The icon bars should become
   even more dynamic: possible text fields and input fields,
   minor changes of style, etc.

3) Possibility to design user interface widgets via markup and
   application to several classical widgets: preferences, printer setup,
   font properties, paragraph properties, etc.

4) Graphical handles inside the main text. E.g. resizing an image
   by dragging its borders, toggling the existence of a border of a table cell,
   annotating existing text with graphics, etc. etc. The problem is that
   these features have a non-trivial intersection with the graphics mode,
   which is no longer maintained by its author, and which probably has to
   be completely rewritten at a certain point. Even though these graphical
   handle based features are important from the user interface point of view,
   they cannot be on top of the list. Notice also that the implementation
   can be tricky: vertical spaces are often rubber spaces, so resizing them
   with the mouse is ill-defined. Similarly, changing the size of an inline
   graphics may change the paragraph breaking and the offset of the graphics.
   Hence, resizing graphics can not be mixed with previewing the result.

Best wishes, --Joris