bobstopper@australispro.com.au writes:
I, for one, would love to see an application that merged the WYSIWYG
features of a word processor with the underlying power of
Emacs. This may start the old "Emacs is a text processor not a word
processor" debate... but there are times when I want a straight
ahead editor (programming) and other times I want to view text in a
word processor (I'm writing a book right now). Trying to get Emacs
to show text in manuscript format is a pain in the butt
(double-spacing lines without hard returns, specific margins,
headers and footers with page numbers, etc.). However, no word
processor I have ever found matches the power and scope of Emacs
(try running a regex search in MS Word). I really do wish someone
would merge the two concepts someday. If anyone responds directly to
you about such a package existing -- please let me know. Thanks-
TODD
Hi
This isn't really a request for help with Emacs but a request for knowledge
on Applications inspired by Emacs, specifically office type Applications.
I love how Emacs is so extensible and provides so many features due to its
use of modes and elisp. So what I'm (very idly at this stage) considering
is the idea of an office kinda suite (yeah, like M$) all within the one
program through the use of emacs style modes and retaining a lot of
extensibility through a lisp dialect (probably guile).
Emacs can probably do something similar to what I'm thinking
already if support was written for it, but I'm thinking Emacs would
probably remain,
well, ugly in the eyes of typical office workers and it would thus
be unappealing.
Instead I'm envisioning something that looks a lot like current gnome
office products... only it's capable of doing all of them simply by loading
the appropriate modes (perhaps after first writing them ;).
Gnome office is a great idea and I think it's a great alternative to M$
office but I think the idea of having separate programs attempting
to integrate through some additional system like bonobo or OLE will
still
remain somewhat unintegrated and perhaps not as consistent in its interface
as what I'm suggesting would be. I imagine typical office users would be
much more satisfied if they only needed the one app that could do everything
and I imagine advanced office users and programmers would be much more
satisfied if they can extend that app to do almost anything they please.
So if something *better* (rather than just equivalent) than M$ office is
written as part of the GNU/Linux project then we have much more clout for
winning the average user over. I imagine for this sort of goal the app
would almost certainly have to have a fully featured M$ Windows port so
it can first appeal to all these M$ windows users, and once they're won
over it's a small step to realising that if everything they need for
office work is in that app, and that app is available on GNU why not just
use GNU?
So, with that description of my infant idea in mind, I have a couple of
questions:
Does anyone know if something like what I'm describing already exists
or is in the process of being written etc?
and of course:
Is my idea stupid, infeasible, lacking in some major consideration, too
damned hard etc or is it actually a good idea?
I'm looking forward to any kinds of comments/suggestions. Thanks!