Re: [Texmacs-dev] TeXmacs & Qt & Perl & POE

[Joris van der Hoeven]

> I am currently writing a parser to convert the scheme file that
> generate menus and bindings. The problem is not so much parsing
> than to make sense of the logic behind the current scheme.

I am not sure that this will be a very good idea,
since the menus are highly contextual.

> I like the way Qt does thing.  Qt works in term of actions.

THe Qt way lacks probably of the dynamism which is present
in TeXmacs. I am not willing to change this.

> An action defines what is done, the keybinding, the text for a menu
> entry, the icon, tip (what you call balloon), status-tip (what appears
> on the status bar when the mouse is over the icon/menu entry, sadly
> missing from TeXmacs), whatthis. Tip, status-tip and whatsthis give
> information on what is done by the action from the less verbose to
> the most verbose.

Status tips could be added easily.
Notice that it amounts to a lot of translation stuff.

> An action can be added
> 
> What is not yet too clear to me is the scope of an action and how it
> works with a stateful engine like TeXmacs. And really I want even more
> state, I want TeXmacs to be either a browser and an editor.
> 
> 
> You are talking about cleaning API. This is the time to do it for
> menus. This is mostly orthogonal with the menu reorganisation
> 
> If I can correcly gather the information, I can spit it in any format
> including scheme with a clearer API

I am not planning to make many changes in the way menus are dealt with.
The only possible change is not to use Scheme variables for the links,
but rather a hashtable. In any case, we will keep programming menus
in Scheme.