Re: [Texmacs-dev] Re: Compiling TexMacs on OSX

[Joris van der Hoeven]

Hi David,

On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 11:21:10AM +0200, David Allouche wrote:
> For TeXmacs, the core would be the
> document-interpreter-typesetter-renderer-editor system.
> 
> That means that some stuff like menu generation and front-end
> keyboard-handling ends up in the platform-specific part. They would
> use a portable APIs to the back-end to produce the keychord
> functionality or find how the toolbars and menus need to change
> according to the document context.
> 
> In other words, texmacs developers should be in the business of
> definining APIs for the unique things texmacs does, instead of trying
> to invent a nth portable GUI toolkit API.

I tend to agree with this. Nevertheless:

1) It *is* a good thing (cf. Abdel too) to have a clean separation between
   the core and the GUI. That means: we *should* define what exactly
   we need from the GUI, even if we concentrate on just one GUI: Qt.

2) Part of the GUI might become present as markup. I am not sure yet
   whether it will be possible to embed native QT GUI elements inside a 
document.
   At any rate, a hybrid approach is possible and 1) is important for this.
   However, this is for the further future.

Anyway, I have little time for TeXmacs development at the moment,
so I first wait for a good beta version of the Qt port.

The first major aim of a good Qt port would be to drastically
simplify the user interface, by making clever use of the extra widgets.
My second main aim is to make the linking system (successor of Proclus)
Qt-compatible, enabling Qt-like programming on the document-level.

Best wishes, Joris