[Texmacs-dev] "no active view" at texmacs startup

[David Allouche]

I think I have isolated some causes of the "no active view" fatal
error at texmacs startup which is reported now and then.

PROCEDURE

One way to reproduce it is to run "texmacs notthere" where notthere is not
the name of any file.

=====
address@hidden alcora% texmacs notthere

TeXmacs] Loading ecrm11 at 300 dpi

Fatal error: No active view in 'tm_server_rep::get_meta'
=====

Another way is to clear the METAFONT cache (on my system, that is
removing all the files in the directory
"/var/cache/fonts/pk/cx/localfont") then open the "rapport.tm"
document which can be found in
<http://ddaa.net/texmacs/doc/alcora.tar.gz>.

=====
address@hidden alcora% cd /var/cache/fonts/pk/cx/localfont
address@hidden localfont% rm *
zsh: sure you want to delete all the files in
/var/cache/fonts/pk/cx/localfont [yn]? y
address@hidden localfont% cd -
~/home/alcora
address@hidden alcora% texmacs rapport.tm

TeXmacs] Loading ecrm11 at 300 dpi
TeXmacs] Loading hyphen.us
TeXmacs] Loading ecrm10 at 600 dpi
TeXmacs] Loading ecrm11 at 600 dpi

Fatal error: No active view in 'tm_server_rep::get_meta'
=====

Starting texmacs without any command line argument, then loading this
document will generate the fonts. After this, you can load the
document at startup using the command line argument and texmacs will
not fail.

DISCUSSION

TeXmacs load documents given as command line arguments before
displaying the main window (that is one reason why I did not succeed
when I tried to fix the "no restore autosave for command line
arguments" bug). 

In the first case, it probably tries to display the "file not found"
error message in the footer, but since the window is not there yet, it
dies.

In the second case, it probably attempts to display the "wait window"
(inside the main window in recent versions of texmacs) but fails.

I think the correct way to fix these bugs would be to postpone the
loading of the command line argument files after the main window has
been displayed. Since (I believe) the main window cannot be displayed
unless an "editor" and its associated "buffer" have been created, we
would need to always create an empty document at startup, then use a
"find-alternate" command (comparable to what emacs does for "C-x C-v")
to replace it by the document given as first command line argument.

This redesign would also make it possible to fix the longstanding
"command line arguments do not restore autosave" bug.

Though, in the "texmacs notthere" case, it might be a better idea to
just give the file name "$PWD/notthere" to a new document, but this
would be points for style.

-- 
                                                            -- ddaa