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Re: [Texmacs-dev] Experiences using TeXmacs


From: Jan Lellmann
Subject: Re: [Texmacs-dev] Experiences using TeXmacs
Date: Fri, 30 Sep 2011 00:25:20 +0200
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.18) Gecko/20110616 Thunderbird/3.1.11

Hello Joris,

I just found the time to compile an up-to-date version from SVN.

1f) Sums&  Integrals: There seems to have been a semantic change
with respect to sums and integrals, which are now considered as
"functions" (i.e. they have an argument), rather than just a symbol.
This introduced a nasty behavior: If one creates an integral (say
<big-around|<int>|<rsub|0><rsub|1>xyz>), puts the cursor at the end
and presses "backspace" in order to delete the x, the<int>  sign at
the front is deleted instead! This is actually very easy to miss if
you press "backspace" multiple times, e.g. in order to delete
multiple characters, and corrupts the formulas. Instead, the last
character should be deleted.

I reverted back to the old behaviour. The semantics of
big operators is now detected directly by a suitable grammar.

This seems to work better now, thanks!

2) Annoying things
------------------

2a) Stylesheet Language: I had to implement some extensions using
the stylesheet language. If one goes one step beyond the standard
functionality, TeXmacs crashes at the blink of an eye. I found
myself spending about 20% of the time figuring out a solution for a
problem, and then spending 80% of the time trying 4 other solutions
until I find one that doesn't crash TeXmacs. While LaTeX can also be
incredibly tiresome to work with, it is solid as a rock. I think if
TeXmacs aims at production quality and use in professional
environment, these issues -- which mostly concern power-users --
desperately need to get fixed. Also, there needs to be a clear
documentation of the evaluation order of the document tree. I spent
several hours trying to figure out the exact semantics of the
various "quote" tags, and eventually gave up.

We probably should make the stylesheet language *less* powerful,
so that users are not invited to use "quote" like tags (which are
indeed somewhat more advanced to manipulate).

We also should make it easier to define really advanced macros
externally using Scheme, rather than mistreating the style language.

I don't think the stylesheet langue needs to be much simpler, since I found that if you want to implement quite basic things (such as an "algorithm" package), it doesn't take very long until you actually need many of those advanced features.

However, it is very difficult to infer the _exact_ semantics of these more advanced operators from the manual. I think one or two pages with the exact description on how exactly nodes in the tree are evaluated (and in which order, in particular in the ambiguous cases) would really help.

2e) Yes/No Dialog: Is there any reason for the cumbersome "yes/no"
prompt? Having to backspace away the "no" and type "yes" is very
VERY annoying. Even a simple "y"/"n" choice with one keypress would
have been more usable. Similarly for the strange Qt "yes/no" dialog
with the combobox. This should just use the default yes/no dialog
that is provided by all OS and by Qt.

You may use arrow up and arrow down.
But true, we might use the standard Qt dialogue for this.

This works now, hooray!! Just one minor quirk, the capitalization is wrong on my system, it says "yes", "no", "Cancel" instead of "Yes", "No", "Cancel".

>> 2f) Extensible brackets: With the automatic extensible brackets
there was apparantly introduced a bug: When extensible brackets are
turned off (Edit>  Preferences>  Keyboard>  Mathematics>  Use
extensible brackets), I am unable to insert extensible brackets
anymore, even using the toolbox icon ("Insert large delimiter"). On
the other hand, if I turn extensible brackets on, I cannot type left
angles anymore ("<" + 5x TAB), it just displays as
"<left-<langle>-0>". I ended up copy&  pasting either the large
brackets or the angles each time I needed them.

Please check whether this is still the case; I corrected several bugs
which were introduced when moving to the new "matching bracket markup".

This is still broken but better hidden: If you press "<" + 5x TAB + "a" it works now, but with "<" + 5x TAB + Alt-F (new fraction) the error still occurs when Texmacs is actually forced to extend the bracket.

2g) Editing large documents: TeXmacs should be able to view separate
parts of a document in different windows. Currently this is not
possible, which makes creating references in large documents very
slow: Switch to other part * wait * look up label * Switch back to
current part * wait * insert label. The same holds for copy&
pasting. Editing the whole document in one window is too slow.

You may use the old system of project files and includes.
I actually want to switch back to this system.

I am somewhat uncertain about this. One one side, having everything in one file makes medium-sized project beautifully organized. However, when I consider my past experiences with large-scale LaTeX projects involving multiple authors, these all relied heavily on the separation into multiple files which can be worked on separately.

Best wishes,
  Jan



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