
The Guile in TeXmacs (2019) [pdf] - mgubi
https://www.iam.uni-bonn.de/fileadmin/user_upload/gubinelli/texmacs/talk-texmacs-guile-strasbourg-june-2019.pdf
======
aasasd
I'm mourning on two graves every time I'm tuning my Org-mode workflow. First,
that Emacs had to have its own language so I can't take my code and run it in
an up-to-date and stable vm embedded in an Android app. Second, that additions
and modifications to Org-mode tend to use Emacs' text juggling here and there
instead of a higher-level Org API and string functions—so even if I had an
embedded Elisp, I'd need to implement half of Emacs.

Emacs' flirt with Guile promised to mend one of those ailments—especially
considering how on my oldish machine Emacs' GC hiccups every few seconds when
just scrolling through an outline, and Emacs internals don't seem to get lots
of low-level development these days (understandably, but still). Alas, that
hope now has a grave of its own.

~~~
BeetleB
> Second, that additions and modifications to Org-mode tend to use Emacs' text
> juggling here and there instead of a higher-level Org API and string
> functions

I was shocked when I started looking into Org's API and found everything is
done via parsing. There's virtually no tree/graph type API.

~~~
tincholio
There's org-element, if you want to parse/generate org-mode, but it's true
that many packages just operate on the text.

~~~
BeetleB
org-element doesn't go far enough. Say I wanted to traverse my document in
depth first order. Or in breadth first order. How do I do it? org-element does
not let me choose.

I say this as there is another well known node based editor out there: Leo.
Nonprogrammers manipulate their documents trivially with Python code in a way
that's a huge pain in Org mode even for seasoned developers.

------
neel_k
TeXmacs is a marvel, and for literally decades I've wondered why it hasn't
seen broader adoption.

~~~
patrec
Decades ago at least it used to crash and eat your data, which I think is a
pretty strong barrier to adoption for software that holds important data of
yours in its own proprietary format. I just tried the most recent version, and
after two decades it still feels pretty alpha quality (Menu -> Quit Texmacs ->
no effect; extremely laggy; low-res icons etc.).

~~~
badsectoracula
I tried it a few months ago because i _really_ prefer GUI tools to entering
weird codes in text files (and i'm saying that as someone who has made his own
tools with his own weird codes :-P) and it felt very "alpha quality" to me
too. It would randomly crash or hang, losing changes or do nothing and when it
worked it would feel sluggish. To test it out i tried to replicate some pages
from the first section of the original Turbo Pascal 3 manual (which is mostly
text) but i could barely do more than two pages.

I like the idea, but the execution wasn't that good. It really didn't felt as
something i could rely on at all.

~~~
mgubi
Many of us use everyday (me included, typing papers of +60 pages on monthly
basis). There are still some rugged edges in the GUI but is certainly not
alpha quality software. The Qt interface have been there since at least 2009
and nowadays we have one or two nasty bugs which we plan to address in the
following months but nothing serious. As you can see from these videos (here
[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjXdYclFpynD0ufg_pp-5...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjXdYclFpynD0ufg_pp-5MT5-X-57Okvs)
) all is quite stable. Unfortunately TeXmacs stress many corners of the Qt/Mac
port and we need to go around bugs there constantly. If you experience more
reproductible crashes then would be good to know, either show up in the
mailing list or file a bug report in Savannah. If nobody complains we cannot
fix them :)

------
teleforce
I'm surprised nobody mentioning the similarity of TeXmacs to Tioga editor
within the legendary CEDAR desktop environment from Xerox [1]:

I've read somewhere some years ago that if you can create a usable hybrid
combination of MS Office Word document (WYSIWYG) and TeX then you have a
killer application for document editor. Additionally, similar to Tioga with
the fact that you can also use other programs inside TeXmacs (e.g.
spreadsheet, Octave, etc) is a huge boon for productivity [2].

I think the naming of the TeXmacs does create confusion though since it
creates the impression that this is combination of TeX and Emacs but it's
neither of them. Just like the Holy Roman Empire after the collapsed of Roman
Empire, it's neither Holy nor Roman nor an Empire.

Now hoping for the modern incarnation version of CEDAR desktop environment.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_dt7NG38V4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_dt7NG38V4)

[2]
[http://cajun.cs.nott.ac.uk/wiley/journals/epobetan/pdf/volum...](http://cajun.cs.nott.ac.uk/wiley/journals/epobetan/pdf/volume3/issue2/ep030dt.pdf)

~~~
mgubi
Interesting! I didn't knew the Tioga editor. All these pioneering work is
really inspiring! Our goals fits very well into the paradigm of active
documents and we have already many features implemented and beautifully
typesetted :
[https://www.texmacs.org/joris/icms14/icms14.pdf](https://www.texmacs.org/joris/icms14/icms14.pdf)

------
bjoli
I followed some of the discussions of the porting to guile3. I have been
amazed at what kind of code guile1.8 allowed, with _no_ separation of macro
expansion and runtime.:

    
    
        (defmacro (foo bar)
          (define (baz n) (bar 4 n))
          baz)
        ((foo +) 4)
    

would work just fine. No separation between runtime and compile time. this
hasn't been the case since 2.0, but 1.8 is still used places. Hopefully their
port to guile 3 works so that they can reap the benefits of the work out in
there over the last 10 years.

~~~
mgubi
The port is ready and working. We are waiting the release of TeXmacs 2.1 soon
and then we will start working to integrate it to the main branch. TeXmacs
will run with Guile 3.0 with the codebase fully compiled. It should improve
loading times and some critical operations, but not benchmarks have been done
yet.

~~~
bjoli
great! thanks for letting me know.

~~~
mgubi
You can find it here:
[https://github.com/mgubi/texmacs/tree/guile3](https://github.com/mgubi/texmacs/tree/guile3)

------
codenamepod
Is it better than TexStudio??

~~~
mgubi
Of course. And no. It depends. :) It is refreshing. Nothing to do with
TeXstudio, LyX, TeXmaker, TeXshop. The name is misleading. Opens your mind.
Like Haskell, like Lisp, like Erlang, looks odd. But then you understand you
always did it wrong before, and you never go back. Bottom line: try.

------
ncmncm
Upvoting for the looped "st" ligatures in the slides.

+1 would sit through

~~~
dddbbb
I find those quite odd. It seems overly ornate compared to the rest of the
font, which doesn't even contain the 'fi' ligature.

~~~
mgubi
Me too, this is the Linux Libertine font. I need to fine a way to disable
those ligatures :)

~~~
imglorp
Please, all deities, nobody use that ST ligature. It's cute for about a
millisecond and then it's annoying.

~~~
mgubi
I checked just now and indeed that ligature has been supressed in the recent
versions of TeXmacs. :)

~~~
ncmncm
It was never the default. You don't get them unless you specifically ask for
them.

~~~
mgubi
No,in a previous version of TeXmacs they were active by default, we changed
that now.

