Re: What improvements would be truly useful?

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: address@hidden (Phillip Lord)
> Cc: Marcin Borkowski <address@hidden>,  address@hidden,  address@hidden,  
> address@hidden,  address@hidden,  address@hidden,  address@hidden
> Date: Fri, 09 Mar 2018 10:56:00 +0000
> 
> > Are you saying that either of these is a WYSIWYG word processor?
> 
> No. But, then Word or LibreOffice are not WYSIWYG either.

This is just a minor semantic issue: let's assume for the purposes of
the current discussion that the definition of a WYSIWYG word processor
is what the Office word processors do.

> Org-mode is essentially a structure first view of text. AUCTeX with
> preview-latex is roughly the same thing. So, both of them have strong
> aspects of modern word-processor.

They both provide the final view of the document only off-line, and
that is the crucial difference, for the purposes of this discussion.

> If Emacs were able to turn org-mode into HTML, render that HTML and
> then make changes to the text of that HTML, then you'd have something
> close to the modal views. Or something like preview-latex which uses
> syntax highlighting to provide the WYS aspect but allows you to turn it
> on and off.

Emacs is capable of displaying text with different typefaces, so it
isn't clear to me why would we need to go through a translator, such
as Org export or LaTeX.

> How easy this would be to implement, I do not know. Emacs does not have
> an MVC architecture -- text properties (i.e. visualization) are stored
> directly with the contents of a buffer, so switching views is clunky or
> difficult (see my own lentic.el for an example).

Actually, MVC is exactly the Emacs architecture.  (And text properties
are stored separately from the buffer contents.)  I wonder what kind
of misunderstanding is at work here.