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

[Joris van der Hoeven]

Hi Ingolf,

Happy new year and sorry for the late reply.

On Fri, Dec 23, 2005 at 10:47:47AM +0100, Ingolf Schäfer wrote:
> 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

Great! Thank you very much!

> 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

I will look at that in more detail later after some deadlines
this month...

> 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.

Yes, that works for me.

> 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.

OK.

> - I have not applied the patches of fink for TeXmacs.

Notice that I fixed the issue with shifting the right footer a bit to
the left in the mainline now. Are there other patches in fink which
should be applied?

> - TeXmacsStarter.app does not look for ghostscript. I am not sure, if  
> we should include ghostscript or set some PATH variable.

Yes, we probably should include ghostscript, as well as some
other applications like ispell. What other applications/libraries
besides TeXmacs do you currently ship with TeXmacs?

One other point, which I also noticed to Martin Costabel:
your current version of the TeXmacs starter does not display
any Type 1 fonts on my system, because your binary incorrectly
finds the default FreeType 2 library shipped with MacOS X
instead of the correct one. I have a similar problem when
compiling TeXmacs from scratch on MacOS X. At the moment,
I manually change the Makefile to indicate the right libraries.
Nevertheless, this problem does not occur for the Fink binaries,
so maybe they already have a more elegant solution.

> >>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.

The idea is that your harddisk would be interpreted like a huge
TeXmacs document, or at least all TeXmacs files on your harddisk.
The TeXmacs file system would provide an interface to this "document"
for elementary operations, such as modifications in the text,
like replacing a subtree of the document by another one.

Of course, "the document" would still correspond to several physical
files on your harddisk, but the "TeXmacs file system" may organize
them in a way which is quite different from what is usually done.
In particular, it would maintain a large index for efficient search
operations. Possibly, it would also do some automatic version control.

My preferred solution would be server-based. In other words,
TeXmacs would constantly talk to some TeXmacs server which
would be in charge of maintaining your TeXmacs documents on
the hard disk. A server-based solution would have the additional
advantages that it can be developed independently from TeXmacs
itself and that it allows you to work in a remote fashion,
via the web.

I also recommend the use of Scheme, so that routines for
the manipulation of TeXmacs trees may be shared with those
in TeXmacs itself (at least in the future).

So: if you or anyone else is interested in creating such
a TeXmacs server, then that would be great. I don't expect
the task to be extremely difficult and new features could
be added incrementally. If you have some proposals or
further questions (like fixing precise protocols),
don't hesitate to post them to the list.

> >>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.

Yes.

Best wishes and many thanks again, Joris