Re: [Texmacs-dev] Alternate texmacs format

[Joris van der Hoeven]

On Mon, Nov 15, 2010 at 01:17:12PM -0000, Sam Liddicott wrote:
> Here's a cunning plan (as Baldrick would say):
>
> Let's reduce texmacs to the level of text editor; but let markup be  
> stored in comments appropriate to the text file being edited.
>
> Thus formatting can be expressed in # comments of a shell script AFTER  
> the first line comment.
>
> Comments in C++ files can be stored in // lines, etc.
>
> Javadoc files may have implicit bookmark links or indexes that "just  
> work" in the generated pdf but which aren't stored in any pre-amble.

This is mainly useful for literate programming, but yes, it could be done;
it should not be hard to write converters which put all TeXmacs markup
inside comments of a given type and keep the main text
(even though formatting will usually be messed up).

> 1. we allow texmacs to be useful to a much wide range of people - yes,  
> stealing the weakly converted emacs audience.
> 2. we hope some of these users can write macros to compete with the  
> emacs macros to make texmacs more useful and bring even more developers
>
> Maybe we need a compatibility model so that emacs lisp can be run by the  
> texmacs scheme?

I am rather going away from Emacs than approaching Emacs.
I more and more believe that the Emacs user interface is very user unfriendly.
On the other hand, the idea of having an extension language is still very 
useful,
but we should use that idea in different ways.

Best wishes, --Joris