[Texmacs-dev] Qt interface TODO list

[Joris van der Hoeven]

Hi all,

Needless to say: our top priority is making the Qt port of TeXmacs
the default interface. Various things still need to be done for that.
Various further things will need to be done in relation to upcoming
changes in the GUI. Here follows a brief list in order of urgency for us:

1) There are still many bugs: see the bug tracker on Savannah and
   select 'Qt port' as the category. Any help on fixing these bugs,
   or reporting new bugs is welcome.

2) The Qt iconbars are very ugly and not very native under MacOS (for instance).
   The following things have to be redesigned with care:

   a) Under MacOS, there is no border between the title bar and the icon bars.
      Also, the main icon bar should not be visible by default.
      Probably, the mode dependent icons should be made larger and
      the focus dependent icons should remain small with a distinguished layout
      and a border with the mode dependent icons.

   b) The style of the icons should be customized: all icons are currently 
monospaced.
      This is both ugly and a waste of space.

   c) The small triangles indicating submenus are ugly. Instead we should make
      the existence of buttons apparent when going over the icons with the 
mouse,
      and the existence of submenus only in that case as well. Furthermore,
      it would be nice to implement buttons with a default action *and*
      a submenu when dragging out of the icon on the bottom.

   d) We need various new widgets for placement on the icon bars:

      * Toggle buttons
      * Text fields
      * Textual input fields
      * Groups of small buttons (e.g.: go back, go forward)

      Also, various styles might be used. For instance, text fields might
      use a smaller grey bold sans serif font and input fields a smaller font
      on a lighter background.

   I will try to implemented most of these things in the X11 front-end,
   so that others may try to do the same thing for the Qt front-end.

3) The following widgets should be added at a certain point:

   * A page setup widget (and a printer widget).
   * A color browser with three modes: standard and recently used colors,
     an rgb color picker and a background pattern selector.
   * A font browser widget (more complex, since it also requires
     a reorganization of the font system).
   * A paragraph properties widget.
   * A preferences widget.
   * A style/package browser widget with basic explanations?

   All these widgets also have to be implemented on the X11 side.
   Some of them, such as the preferences widget, would benefit
   from a general mechanism for designing widget via markup.
   Nevertheless, we do not need that many extra widgets
   (most issues are better adressed by a well designed focus icons bar).
   If we are impatient, then we may actually implement a few ad hoc
   widgets which might later be replaced by something better.

Best wishes, --Joris