Re: What improvements would be truly useful?

[Phillip Lord]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

>> From: Marcin Borkowski <address@hidden> Cc: Daniel Colascione
>> <address@hidden>, address@hidden, address@hidden,
>> address@hidden, address@hidden, address@hidden
>> Date: Tue, 06 Mar 2018 21:01:00 +0100
>> 
>> > I want to do my word processing in Emacs,
>> 
>> You already can.  Quite a few people do this, using Org-mode or AUCTeX.
>
> Are you saying that either of these is a WYSIWYG word processor?

No. But, then Word or LibreOffice are not WYSIWYG either. Both have
extensive modal views of the underlying document (web layout, reading
mode, outline view).

Org-mode is essentially a structure first view of text. AUCTeX with
preview-latex is roughly the same thing. So, both of them have strong
aspects of modern word-processor.

If Emacs were able to turn org-mode into HTML, render that HTML and
then make changes to the text of that HTML, then you'd have something
close to the modal views. Or something like preview-latex which uses
syntax highlighting to provide the WYS aspect but allows you to turn it
on and off.

How easy this would be to implement, I do not know. Emacs does not have
an MVC architecture -- text properties (i.e. visualization) are stored
directly with the contents of a buffer, so switching views is clunky or
difficult (see my own lentic.el for an example).

Phil