[Texmacs-dev] Novelties

[Joris van der Hoeven]

Hi all,

On the new CVS version of TeXmacs, you may find two new things:

1) The plug-in evaluation mechanism has been made asynchroneous
---------------------------------------------------------------
 
Hence, you may let an external system compute something and
let TeXmacs continue doing something else in the meantime.
The new feature relies on the dialogue mechanism. For instance:

        (dialogue
          (with r (apply plugin-async-eval "my-plugin" "default" command)
            (display* "Computed " r "\n")))

This piece of code will let your plugin execute the specified command.
While the plugin is busy, control is handled back to TeXmacs
(i.e. the "dialogue" command simply returns). As soon as the plugin
has completed its computation the result will be sent back to TeXmacs
and the result is printed. The new feature should in particular
be useful for proof assistants (such as Coq or Omega).

2) The upcoming GUI using TeXmacs markup
----------------------------------------

A new GUI is under development, which will still take a lot of time
to become operational. It relies on

  a) TeXmacs markup for GUI elements (in TeXmacs/packages/gui).
  b) A Scheme interface for generating widgets (in TeXmacs/progs/kernel/gui).

For some examples, please take a look at

        TeXmacs/progs/kernel/gui/gui-test.scm

In a Scheme session, you may for instance do

        (use-modules (kernel gui gui-test))
        (widget-popup "Copy" '(widget-5))
        (widget-popup "Counter" '(widget-6))
        (interactive-popup replace-start-forward)

etc. Any comments or help are welcome.

Best wishes, Joris