Re: [Texmacs-dev] Alternate texmacs format

[Sam Liddicott]

Hi Joris;

I don't disagree with you plan, but just want to clarify what I meant, below.

On 17/11/10 22:47, Joris van der Hoeven wrote:

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).

It would not be for literate programming (which already works) but for normal non-literate programming.

It would allow texmacs to be an extensible code editor. The first feature advantage would be rich-text comments with pictures and formulas.

Any literate features, such as parameterized chunks, code-reformatting and so on would not be possible at all.

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.

I agree. The step towards emacs would not be because it is the right direction in and of itself, but because it places a stepping stone away from emacs for the emacs users.

On the other hand, the idea of having an extension language is still very useful,
but we should use that idea in different ways.

I agree there for sure!

Sam

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