Re: GUI and redisplay work (was: SVG widget in GNU Emacs)

[Alexandre Garreau]

Le mercredi 27 octobre 2021, 19:12:36 CEST tomas@tuxteam.de a écrit :
> On Wed, Oct 27, 2021 at 06:07:53PM +0200, Alexandre Garreau wrote:
> 
> [...]
> 
> > All current Web engines derive from KHTML and Gecko, which are very
> > old… wouldn’t the web engines in 2050 still derive from them, given
> > their age?
> > 
> > On the other hand, TeX has now’ve been around for half a century, as
> > long as emacs, and longer than the gnu (and nowadays main or even
> > only seriously used) implementation of emacs [...]
> 
> Before you start re-inventing the world, if I were you, I'd have a
> look at what is "out there" already. Perhaps to contribute to it,
> perhaps to copy it, but just perhaps to learn from it on how to
> do (or not to do) things:
> 
>   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_TeXmacs
>   http://texmacs.org/tmweb/home/welcome.en.html
> 
> I think Joris and the other (many!) contributors could share quite
> a few stories...

I know TeXmacs and since it initially enthusiastmed me a lot (iirc I even 
talked a bit with its author during a GHM a decade ago), I several times 
tried to use it but unfortunately my computer is too slow to run it 
fluently, so I gave up trying.

Moreover while WYSIWYM looked like a good idea orally, using TeXmacs was 
at the same time more confusing than standard markup, and WYSIWYG 
(although I typically use WYSIWYG only in a very very limited way), so 
maybe the idea is just too innovative to be easy to grasp from a single 
software that’s rarely used (I rarely typeset documents actually, 
especially to print anything, and I prefer to take notes in text editors 
because I don’t get margins nor slowness, I just compile them once when I 
export my exams to pdf).

Also looks like it’s only a text processor with it own format, and not a 
general purpose editor, that could edit, say, HTML or TeX, or, most 
importantly, its own config files, so it’s nor really like emacs, nor TeX :/

And although it looks as good as TeX typographically, it’s younger and 
could be less stable, but I’m sure there could be good ideas and 
experiment here… I just already don’t have the time and attention 
capability to work on emacs as much as I’d like (so I still haven’t 
contributed anything), and TeXmacs would be lower priority for me.

Also I’d like first and foremost to read and understand all TeX’s and 
Metafont’s source (especially as it’s heavily documented in its own 
favored way and made to be read that way), and understand how does GTK 
works, before to try to understand some software that uses the later to 
incompatibly mimmick the first.  I still haven’t done that.  And I should 
reread the TeXbook, but doing the exercises and reading the source at same 
time.