[Texmacs-dev] Re: Compiling TexMacs on OSX

[Abdelrazak Younes]

address@hidden wrote:
> I fully understand your concerns about "resource management". I will 
> express my point of view on this particular situation, I think this 
> does not necessarily reflect the point of view of Joris (the main 
> developer) or of other people of the project (which I do not know 
> personally). I work on this port because I want a scientific writing 
> platform on Mac to work on.
As I said, everybody's free to do what he/she wants :-)
Personal reasons such as "learning Cocoa" are perfectly valid reasons.

> In my opinion it is not really true that e.g. a Qt/Mac application 
> looks like a Mac app, for the same reason that NeoOffice does not look 
> like a mac app or that MS Word does not look like a mac app. 
> Prototypical Mac apps are Mail, iPhoto, iMovie and they have not so 
> many buttons and an enterely different concept of GUI that the one 
> allowed by "universal" toolkits.
Well, there is a lot do about look&feel that is not really about the 
toolkit but about how you program the app to interact with the user. For 
example we do a lot to take care of LyX/Mac users. You should give a try 
to latest LyX-1.6beta3 to see how far we go.


> TeXmacs is perfect under X, but the point is that I do not like its 
> interface, I wanted a software with a simpler interface and which can 
> take advantage of the Mac OS. From the point of view of the user what 
> is the rationale to buy an OS just to be able to run the same apps 
> which run under Linux?

Of the user? A lot! I mean, IMO a user would prefer a complete app 
instead of a half baked one, even if it is not fully integrated with the 
system with bells and whistles. Recently we questioned ourself if it was 
better to have multiple version of the menubar depending of the 
platform. A Mac tailored menubar would indeed provide a better initial 
experience to the Mac user. But, and this a big *but*, we decided that 
it was better for user support to distribute the same menubar on all 
platforms. But we make it easy for the advanced user to modify his 
menubar at will. So a Mac menubar is possible without any compromission.

> So I take literally the idea of "free software" and I want to adapt 
> this incredible piece of software to my workplace (and this workplace 
> is, in this moment, a Mac). The first step is to take the original 
> interface under Cocoa, next some changes in the UI will come. It's a 
> personal endeavour which I share with the community. There were no 
> official plans for this port: only my interest has started it, and 
> Joris sometimes is worried about the possibility that the port will 
> die once I will shift to other interests. I cannot exclude this.
>
> I had time to spend. I wasn't interested in improving TeXmacs under 
> Linux. I'm working to port TeXmacs under Cocoa with the aim to make it 
> a simple and productive piece of software to use for my own work. As a 
> by-product I'm learning a lot about typesetting, interactive editors 
> and last and least: C++.

All these are valid reason. Still, I think you'll learn a lot more by 
collaborating with the other developers.

> I think Henry Lesourd is working on the Qt (or Gtk, I dont remember) 
> port of TeXmacs. In this early stage is interesting to have people 
> working on ports just to devise ways of overcome problems most of 
> which are of the same nature, irrespective of the target platform, and 
> find solutions (which againt could be easy to adapt to other targets, 
> since most of the APIs are similar).

I am not sure. I had a look at the GUI API you are creating and I can 
tell you that this will prove inefficient because that's exactly how we 
did it with LyX. You are creating a set of virtual interface that can be 
implemented by the different frontend. In a way that means that the 
'kernel' drives the 'frontend'. This is the wrong way, the 'frontend' 
should drives the core. Ideally, two frontends should not have anything 
in common,  no virtual interface, no predefined way to launch a dialog 
or move the scrollbar. The 'frontend' should use the core typesetting 
function as a library. That's the change we did in LyX-1.6 and I can 
assure you that it's an awful lot simpler.

> As a programmer I do not consider myself as a "resource" of the 
> TeXmacs project.

And you should not. But working with others is more fun and you will 
learn more in the process than if you stay alone. For me, personally, 
this opensource business is not about giving yourself but about having 
fun and learning in a very selfish and egocentric way :-)

> Inversely I consider this "free software" as a resource to exploit to 
> take pleasure in programming and build a  tool which I will like to 
> work with.

Sure, like me with LyX.

> (and if I cannot manage to reach this goal I will continue to write 
> math using TeX....)
You should try LyX sometime ;-)

Abdel