Re: [Texmacs-dev] Better integration of TeXmacs in MacOS X

[Joris van der Hoeven]

On Mon, Dec 19, 2005 at 07:29:03PM +0100, Ingolf Schäfer wrote:
> I am using TeXmacs on MacOS X and wonder, if there could be a better  
> integration of TeXmacs into the operating system. As a start, I have  
> made an applescript droplet, with which you can open .tm files with  
> double click out of the finder (it starts X11, if not already open  
> and opens the file in TeXmacs).
> 
> Is there any interest, to add such a wrapper to the TeXmacs  
> distribution? If there is, then we might even consider relasing  
> TeXmacs as an application bundle, which does not depend one fink  
> (i.e. a binary TeXmacs with included guile), which could be installed  
> the Mac OS X way, by just copying the folder to your harddisk. I  
> volunteer to build such a bundle, if anyone, besides myself would  
> like one.

Sure, I recently got a powerbook myself, and I am pretty much convinced
that both a droplet and an application bundle would be very useful.
I made a droplet myself too, but have no idea about how to make it
working elsewhere than on my laptop. As to an easy-to-install
application bundle, probably extracted from fink or so,
this would surely interest a lot of mac users.
As to a more aqua-ish GUI, that would probably be much more work.

> First, I would like to have a spotlight plugin, to get metadata out  
> of .tm files, for optimized searching. If I find time enough over the  
> holidays, I will do this myself.

Sure, that would be nice. More generally, I am searching for someone
who would like to work on some kind of searchable "TeXmacs file system"
(independently from Mac users). But this is of course a much larger project,
with one nice feature that it can be developed in a quite independent way
from TeXmacs (and might be useful to other projects).

> Second, the place of the user files in ~/.TeXmacs is rather  
> "unmacish". I would prefer that they are by default in ~/Library/ 
> TeXmacs, because this is the standard location or user files and  
> moreover you can view this folder directly in the Finder.app.

One might add some #ifdef's to the source code to change the default
path for TEXMACS_HOME_PATH.