Re: [Texmacs-dev] Better integration of TeXmacs in MacOS X

[Ingolf Schäfer]

Am 19.12.2005 um 21:34 schrieb Joris van der Hoeven:

> On Mon, Dec 19, 2005 at 07:29:03PM +0100, Ingolf Schäfer wrote:
> > I am using TeXmacs on MacOS X and wonder, if there could be a better
> > integration of TeXmacs into the operating system. As a start, I have
> > made an applescript droplet, with which you can open .tm files with
> > double click out of the finder (it starts X11, if not already open
> > and opens the file in TeXmacs).
> >
> > Is there any interest, to add such a wrapper to the TeXmacs
> > distribution? If there is, then we might even consider relasing
> > TeXmacs as an application bundle, which does not depend one fink
> > (i.e. a binary TeXmacs with included guile), which could be installed
> > the Mac OS X way, by just copying the folder to your harddisk. I
> > volunteer to build such a bundle, if anyone, besides myself would
> > like one.
>
> Sure, I recently got a powerbook myself, and I am pretty much  
> convinced
> that both a droplet and an application bundle would be very useful.
> I made a droplet myself too, but have no idea about how to make it
> working elsewhere than on my laptop. As to an easy-to-install
> application bundle, probably extracted from fink or so,
> this would surely interest a lot of mac users.
> As to a more aqua-ish GUI, that would probably be much more work.

I have made a first application bundle just for testing. You can  
download it here:

http://www.math.uni-bremen.de/~ovidius/texmacs.dmg.zip

The Xcode project files for the starter can be obtained here (for  
XCode 2.2):
http://www.math.uni-bremen.de/~ovidius/texmacsstarter-src.zip

You can install it by copying TeXmacsStarter.app anywhere you like.  
If you put it into the Applications folder, you should see, that  
all .tm files have icons now. Double-clicking a .tm file should  
launch X11.app and TeXmacs. The bundle itself contains a starter and  
binary versions of readline, guile and TeXmacs. A log file is written  
to ~/TeXmacs/run.log, which contains to output of TeXmacs.

At the momentary state, there are some drawbacks:
- Due to laziness this version is for Mac OS X 10.4 aka Tiger only.  
This can and should be fixed.
- Although the starter itself is a universal binary, I did not manage  
to make one out of all the applications. Namely guile resists. The  
good news is, that cross compiling TeXmacs is no problem :-)
- Launching the starter only without dropping some file, will not  
open TeXmacs. This will change, but for the moment I am happy with it.
- I have not applied the patches of fink for TeXmacs.
- TeXmacsStarter.app does not look for ghostscript. I am not sure, if  
we should include ghostscript or set some PATH variable.

> > First, I would like to have a spotlight plugin, to get metadata out
> > of .tm files, for optimized searching. If I find time enough over the
> > holidays, I will do this myself.
>
> Sure, that would be nice. More generally, I am searching for someone
> who would like to work on some kind of searchable "TeXmacs file  
> system"
> (independently from Mac users). But this is of course a much larger  
> project,
> with one nice feature that it can be developed in a quite  
> independent way
> from TeXmacs (and might be useful to other projects).
I am  sorry, but I do not understand, what a searchable "TeXmacs file  
system" should be.
> > Second, the place of the user files in ~/.TeXmacs is rather
> > "unmacish". I would prefer that they are by default in ~/Library/
> > TeXmacs, because this is the standard location or user files and
> > moreover you can view this folder directly in the Finder.app.
>
> One might add some #ifdef's to the source code to change the default
> path for TEXMACS_HOME_PATH.
I could do this, but I just wanted to know if this is acceptable.

Yours,

Ingolf