
25 years ago I hoped we would extend Emacs to do WYSIWG word processing - ics
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2013-11/msg00515.html
======
tikhonj
With inline LaTeX previews, we're already surprisingly close. In fact, I'd say
that going all the way would be almost a step back. WYSIWYG is ultimately not
an ideal editing paradigm: it wins in the short term, being easy to learn, but
drags you down in the long term.

I've recently started using Quora a bit more. Unlike StackOverflow, they use a
WYSIWYG editor. I've found this significantly less convenient than
StackOverflow's markdown. Similarly, switching from Word to LaTeX was an
improvement for most tasks once I got used to it.

Unfortunately, LaTeX has a bunch of its own shortcomings not related to it's
non-WYSIWYG nature. For common tasks, I think going from markdown to LaTeX is
ideal. Markdown itself is far from perfect, but it's the best compromise I've
found especially with Pandoc's extensions.

So here's my idea for a great emacs-based document editor: markdown with
inline math previews coupled with a full live preview to the side. All the
necessary modes for this already exist (like whizzy TeX and AucTeX's
previews), so it should be much easier to put together than a full WYSIWYG
editor. More productive, too.

~~~
coldtea
> _With inline LaTeX previews, we 're already surprisingly close. In fact, I'd
> say that going all the way would be almost a step back. WYSIWYG is
> ultimately not an ideal editing paradigm: it wins in the short term, being
> easy to learn, but drags you down in the long term._

That --in the extend that it happens-- is a byproduct of the limitations of
current WYSIWYG editors, not something inherent in the idea of WYSIWYG
editing.

It's not like we had a lot of brainstorming and innovating solutions competing
in this area (in fact, there are only 3, all too similar, major products:
Word, Pages and Open Office, of which one has 90% of the users).

Second, what's "inconvenient" and "distracting" for one user, is a must and an
inspiration for another.

Not to mention there are several different use cases for WYSIWYG editing, and
LaTeX style editing doesn't cover them all. For example it's dreadful for
quick experimentation with placement and formatting of small, disparate
elements (basically, anything not according to the "spec").

> _I 've recently started using Quora a bit more. Unlike StackOverflow, they
> use a WYSIWYG editor. I've found this significantly less convenient than
> StackOverflow's markdown._

WYSIWYG's strong point is not small website comments.

~~~
chriswarbo
> That --in the extend that it happens-- is a byproduct of the limitations of
> current WYSIWYG editors, not something inherent in the idea of WYSIWYG
> editing.

If WYSIWYG editing is not inherently limited, why do pretty much no editors
actually support it? For example, spelling/grammar checkers are useful, but
when pseudo-WYSIWYG editors implement them, they underline the text, or change
its colour. This colouring and formatting doesn't appear when the document is
printed. Hyperlinks are usually hit and miss; sometimes they print as 'blue
and underline' (but, of course, are useless), sometimes they don't.
Annotations don't print, but they do show on the screen. Automatically-
generated content like page numbers are often shown differently, eg. with a
grey background. Again, this doesn't appear when printed.

In short, what you see is certainly not what you get; but removing these non-
WYSIWYG features would be a step backwards.

~~~
coldtea
> _If WYSIWYG editing is not inherently limited, why do pretty much no editors
> actually support it? For example, spelling /grammar checkers are useful, but
> when pseudo-WYSIWYG editors implement them, they underline the text, or
> change its colour. This colouring and formatting doesn't appear when the
> document is printed._

That's just an extra convinience feature you can turn on or off, and doesn't
have anything to do with whether the editor is WYSIWYG or not.

It's not like the program forces you to see red swiggly lines underneath words
when editing...

> _Hyperlinks are usually hit and miss; sometimes they print as 'blue and
> underline' (but, of course, are useless), sometimes they don't._

Which is configurable too in all editors I know of. And the "blue and
underline" is not exactly useless -- it conveys the information that this part
of the document was a hyperlink initially.

> _In short, what you see is certainly not what you get_

No, it's 99.9% of what you get, minus additional layers of information that
people expect to be there, and you can turn on or off.

------
gexla
> I don't know how to use Org mode, and don't know what it does (it seems to
> do so many things), but if it displays through Emacs then there are many
> formatting features that it can't display in a WYSIWYG fashion like Libre
> Office.

I can't believe Stallman doesn't know how to use Org mode. If he is interested
in selling people on Emacs, then Org mode is one of the killer features for
the presentation. I don't expect him to know something he has no use for, but
he should know the most popular components in the Emacs ecosystem. Org mode is
one of the only reasons I started using Emacs.

~~~
reuven
I completely believe it. First of all, Stallman isn't known for hiding his
opinions, or masking his version of the truth.

But beyond that, Stallman has often failed or refused to use technologies that
the rest of us take for granted. Years ago, I spoke with him about a proposed
bill in the US Congress that would have affected intellectual property laws.
(I can't remember the specifics.) At some point, Stallman, who had strongly
encouraged people to contact their representatives to oppose the bill, told me
that he hadn't actually read it. I told him that it was on the Web, to which
he responded, "I don't surf the Web."

Now, I can understand being against certain browsers, servers, and operating
systems. But to flat-out refuse to read things on the Web struck me as
counterproductive. I don't know if he has changed his attitude toward the Web
in the years since, but assume that when he says he doesn't use a certain
technology, he means it.

~~~
belorn
> But to flat-out refuse to read things on the Web

As you described it, he did not actually flat-out refuse. He simply stated
that he hasn't read all the documented published on the world wide web, since
he don't "surf" the web.

His approach to the web has been described many times. When someone sends him
a link that they want him to read, stallman uses the program wget to download
the file and reads it offline.

~~~
reuven
When I specifically asked him if he had read the bill in question to which he
was objecting, which was available on the Web, he said that he had not,
because he doesn't surf the Web. He, not I, equated "surfing" with "reading
documents."

The impression I got from that conversation was that Stallman makes no effort
to go out and find things that would be useful and of interest to him.

I don't call that "surfing," but "research" and "responsible," especially from
someone who then calls upon people to contact their public representatives.

I don't care how much he hangs out on Hacker News, or elsewhere. I do care
that he clearly indicated, in that conversation, that he will not do the
necessary legwork (which doesn't even require using your legs) that can even
help to strengthen his arguments.

I also think that it's helpful for everyone to read things from opposing and
diverse viewpoints. By only reading those documents that his supporters send
him, I worry that Stallman is ignoring arguments that may inform his own, or
even change them.

~~~
aestra
>I worry that Stallman is ignoring arguments that may inform his own, or even
change them.

Of course he is! It is called confirmation bias. It is very very strong,
especially with people like Stallman who hold strong beliefs. We are all
guilty of it to some extent.

Here's some reading:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias)

[http://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/06/23/confirmation-
bias/](http://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/06/23/confirmation-bias/)

[http://socialpsychologyeye.wordpress.com/2011/04/22/confirma...](http://socialpsychologyeye.wordpress.com/2011/04/22/confirmation-
bias-satire-and-stephen-colbert/)

Confirmation bias (also called confirmatory bias or myside bias) is a tendency
of people to favor information that confirms their beliefs or hypotheses.[Note
1][1] People display this bias when they gather or remember information
selectively, or when they interpret it in a biased way. The effect is stronger
for emotionally charged issues and for deeply entrenched beliefs. They also
tend to interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing position.
Biased search, interpretation and memory have been invoked to explain attitude
polarization (when a disagreement becomes more extreme even though the
different parties are exposed to the same evidence), belief perseverance (when
beliefs persist after the evidence for them is shown to be false), the
irrational primacy effect (a greater reliance on information encountered early
in a series) and illusory correlation (when people falsely perceive an
association between two events or situations).

A series of experiments in the 1960s suggested that people are biased toward
confirming their existing beliefs. Later work re-interpreted these results as
a tendency to test ideas in a one-sided way, focusing on one possibility and
ignoring alternatives. In certain situations, this tendency can bias people's
conclusions. Explanations for the observed biases include wishful thinking and
the limited human capacity to process information. Another explanation is that
people show confirmation bias because they are weighing up the costs of being
wrong, rather than investigating in a neutral, scientific way.

\----

The most interesting is the last link. They did a study about the show The
Colbert Report, which is satire, He plays a parody of conservative political
pundits. The study looked at the viewer's political beliefs and what they
thought of Colbert's.

"More liberal participants believed Colbert was liberal and that the show was
satirical. More conservative participants believed Colbert was conservative
and genuinely believed his “satirical” arguments. Essentially, viewers of
liberal and conservative orientations tended to perceive Colbert as supporting
whatever views they personally held."

~~~
untog
I actually read a fascinating article about the Colbert Report saying that
conservative viewers of the show thought that he was a conservative satirising
a liberal satirising a conservative. Fascinating, really.

------
Zigurd
Is this as staggeringly naive as it looks?

Some of the people responding are steering the discussion to a layout language
with a preview window. I don't know if they are doing it because they prefer
to work in such a user-hostile mode (I did this for a book, in Eclipse. Ugh.),
or if they think this is a more sane goal.

WYSIWYG has its own issues. most users of word processors have no idea that
paragraphs are objects in an object model, but the command structure only
becomes clear when you realize that. Most users just hack at a document it
until it looks right enough. At the really diabolical end of the spectrum I
could show you an Ericsson documentation template that manages to manifest
dozens of bugs in Word, laying in wait to eat your previous hour's work. I'm
sure you have inherited documents like that.

It's all more or less a kludge, and WYSIWYG never is quite, nor is it real
direct manipulation. At best it is something like "moderately friendly visual
document CAD, if you get the trick behind the slick appearance."

~~~
specialist
_a layout language with a preview window_

aka digital typesetting

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typesetting#Digital_era](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typesetting#Digital_era)

If not quite the Correct Answer, it might be the Best Available Answer.

My mother used to be a Linotype ninja, blazing thru the sunday paper's ad
inserts. The user input language was a page description language, little
different from PostScript or HP's PCL (or HPGL/2). While modern systems are
more accessible, I've not seen a system since that matched that concision and
productivity.

I loved the precise control of WordPerfect (reveal codes) and FrameMaker
(parametric styles). I can't comment on modern InDesign (stopped around
version 2), but early on it was not considered a feature complete replacement
for FrameMaker.

People speak highly of LaTex. I've not used it for real work.

I've done my share of UI, scenegraph, layout engines, plotter/print drivers,
prepress / imposition, etc.

I gave up trying to integrate general purpose constraints systems into
layouts. Too many edge cases, hard to debug. I now believe layouts heuristics
should be implemented imperatively.

So I created DesignGridLayout, which captures grid based rules for UIs in a
"fluent" API (aka method chaining).
[https://designgridlayout.java.net/examples.html](https://designgridlayout.java.net/examples.html)
(The awesome Jean-Francois Poilpret has maintained, extended the project for
years.)

Though the box model sucks, I haven't yet given up on some mythical, simple
scenegraphs + typography + content hybrid. I still don't know what that'll
look like.

------
Derbasti
Quite simply, explicit markup makes it very easy to see what formatting will
be applied to what text.

WYSIWYG only shows you the end result, with no clean way to see how you got
there. Was this font introduced because of some theme? Was it applied because
of some toolbar button? Is it the result of some template? Was it copied from
somewhere else, thereby baking someone else's theming into the copied text?

These are the questions that make WYSIWYG so confusing. These are the things
that make explicit markup so straight forward. I don't think you can have
WYSIWYG without the confusion or while maintaining the power of explicit
markup.

If anything, Markdown or RST or Org provide a compelling middle ground: Markup
is still explicit but minimal, and styling tries to come as close as possible
to WYSIWYG without sacrificing control.

This, I think, is a far more compelling route to take than WYSIWYG or LaTeX-
style explicit markup.

~~~
minor_nitwit
I prefer the paradigm where you edit in something like markdown but the live
preview is available on the right hand side or down below the text. All it
needs is a catchy acronym.

The controls for the text should be immediate in the text, that makes sense
and is the most powerful implementation. But you have to see what it all means
and be able to identify problems along the way when you make a mistake & know
what your markdown is creating. Otherwise you type it out and notice that you
forgot to force 15 line breaks.

~~~
Derbasti
I think this is usually called What You See Is What You Mean, or WYSIWYM.

However, there could be a performance problem. Font setting and layout in
Latex is markedly superior to, say, web browsers or Word. But Latex often
takes several seconds to lay stuff out. Then again, Indesign can do it, so it
should be possible in general.

~~~
bowerbird
it is possible to do it.

without performance problems.

markdown has several such solutions, online and off. the offline apps are
typically mac, the leaders being "marked" (marked2.com) which works with any
text-editor, and "multimarkdown composer" (multimarkdown.com), which wraps a
dedicated-editor around the conversion-routine.

i will soon be introducing my own light-markup system \-- z.m.l. (zen markup
language) -- and will offer apps which are cross-platform offline, as well as
web-apps, including one with an a.p.i. that can be used by anyone. send it a
light-markup .zml file; it sends back .html.

for a similar online solution for markdown, see here:
[http://markdownrules.com](http://markdownrules.com)

and this is where stallman's request has gone awry...

namely, you don't need to wrap the conversion-routines into the app, or change
the interface of the app at all.

instead, simply route your light-markup plain-text file to a converter, and
show the output in a preview window. and yes, it should be side-by-side with
your editor and show the changes in real-time as you make (or save) them.

my light-markup system differs from markdown in that it: 1) is targeted at
long-form documents, such as books, 2) avoids the problems which plague
markdown, 3) focuses on lightness as an asset that _eases_editing_, rather
than as something that _fosters_readability_of_the_raw_format_ (as there's no
reason to read the file in that raw format).

speaking of readability, as well as my focus on long-form, .html is not the
only output format supported by my system; we also need .epub, .mobi, .pdf,
and still-to-come formats.

the other important thing about z.m.l. is that its focus on _books_ shines a
different focus on needed functionality, compared to that provided by
generation of a mere web-page.

all this and even more, coming before thanksgiving day...

-bowerbird

~~~
Derbasti
This sounds exciting! (Though I must say, I am all but married to Org at this
point.)

On a different note though, I feel that Microsoft Word, and web browsers,
really do a terrible job at rendering text. Kerning is often bad, there are
frequent widows and orphans, pagination is often a mess, hyphenation is
laughable. These are real issues and they are not solved by a different markup
language.

So far, TeX and Indesign are the only software I know of that really manage to
solve this problem. I would love to see a new export format that can deal with
this.

Maybe what we really need is a new middle ground: A kind of LLVM for text
processing. An intermidiary machine format that serves as a target for all
different kinds of markup languages that can be further compiled to
beautifully rendered text in whatever format you desire.

~~~
bowerbird
thanks! it's been so long, i lost my excitement. ;+)

here's my kickstarter, one jump-off point: >
[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bowerbird/jaguar-cub-
a-s...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bowerbird/jaguar-cub-a-simple-
tool-for-great-e-books)

got a working web-app there, as an appetite-whetter.

 __*

also just posted "markdown considered harmful", at:

> [https://medium.com/the-future-of-
> publishing/495ccfe24a52](https://medium.com/the-future-of-
> publishing/495ccfe24a52)

needed to clear my plate / get that off my chest...

 __*

if you'd be so kind as to point to either of those, here at h.n. or elsewhere,
i'd consider it an honor. (i have never been able to get any traction here; i
guess i need to go see what the reddit kids say.)

 __*

i too am totally dissatisfied with web typography. it's atrocious. but a lot
of the problems you note _can_ be corrected, such as widows, and pagination,
if you adopt a mindset that considers it important.

and i won't stop until i've created e-books that are _both_ highly functional
_and_ very beautiful.

anyway, thanks again.

-bowerbird

p.s. but i don't think we even need hyphenation now.

------
dspillett
I'm hoping this is a joke, otherwise

> Could people please start working on the features that are needed?

sounds far too like the completely detail-less requirements we get through
from our clients like "please provide robust MI".

~~~
rout39574
Visualize RMS as like the patron saint of a religion, which is full of schism
and sub-sect.

He's using his position to influence mindshare, and he doesn't think he's got
a handle on the details. He just wants some of his devotees to start kicking
the problem around.

~~~
mathattack
Does this style of management work for them? I'm not close enough to know if
this is all that it takes.

~~~
craigching
Read the thread of comments, people take him seriously and are discussing the
problem. I'd say, in the short term at least, it does work.

~~~
mathattack
Right - but how about the long term?

My experience in the corporate world is things start with momentum, but
without a cop managing all the details, things don't get over the finish line.

Does this method get projects over the finish line? I fully understand that
it's unproductive to be a cop with high talent volunteers.

------
ChuckMcM
This is the epitome of the challenge of open source.

RMS whines : _" 25 years ago I hoped we would extend Emacs to do WYSIWG word
processing. That is why we added text properties and variable width fonts.
However, more features are still needed to achieve this.

Could people please start working on the features that are needed?"_

And he's 100% accurate, it has been 25 years, and there is an open source
WYSIWYG word processor, called Libre Office these days, but that isn't what
RMS wants. He wants someone to do the work to make _his tool of choice_ into
something which can do _what he wants to do in it._

A lot of people go this way, and we see several tools that all do variations
on the same thing in their own peculiar way (Vive du choix!) but that means it
is really really hard to figure out how to get somethings done when each set
of tools rely on their own set of other tools.

The nice thing about Cathedrals is that you know what is expected of you :-)

~~~
ajross
I don't see why this is specific to Open Source. Android does all the same
stuff iOS does. WebKit was a senseless clone of stuff already handled well by
Gecko. How many Javascript interprers do we need in this life? What's the
point of clang again when we have gcc and icc and msvc?

People work on what they want to work on, based on the products that they want
(or that they think someone else might want to buy). Sometimes they're right.
Sometimes they're wrong.

Sometimes they troll. RMS isn't known for that (at all), but... if you _did_
want to troll the free software nuts, WYSIWYG emacs certainly has to be up
there on the list of flameworthy titles...

~~~
ChuckMcM
It is specific actually to all volunteer organizations. Such organizations
have a hard time getting things done for which the population of the
organization that would benefit is 'small' relative to the capable volunteers.
I often use KiCAD as an example, its an excellent EDA program for Linux but is
nearly as capable as early Windows offerings from commercial outfits were 10
years ago [1]. The challenge was that people who wanted to use EDA tools
couldn't write one, people who could write EDA tools didn't need one. So until
Jean-Pierre came along there were no EDA tools for Linux.

Basically in a 'free software' context, there was no way for people who wanted
an EDA tool to fund the development of that tool spontaneously. Jean-Pierre
got it to the point where is was kinda sorta useful and it has since gathered
enough momentum to get to be very useful.

So RMS wants emacs to have a WYSIWYG mode, and has wanted it for 25 years, but
there is no way for him and say the other 150 people [2] in the world that
want that to express some sort of financial interest so that someone who could
do it would be willing to sit down and spend a year and do it.

At a company they have this revenue stream and someone says "We need a new
product" and they pick one and set some developers on the path of making it
real. But in the open source world we don't have that (either the unified
direction or the funding to push for it).

I've long felt that we could perhaps create a 'prize' system ala the X-prize
where people could donate to a 'prize fund' if they wanted something, like
"I'll donate $10 to a prize fund for an awesome CAD tool that runs on Linux."
and that prize fund would grow as people donated to it, and anyone who wanted
to claim the prize could do so by shipping / releasing a product that met the
requirements of the people who had donated to the prize fund. Once a prize
fund got to $100K or so I'm sure you would find a couple of programmers who
would take the chance to sit down and write it to claim the prize. This would
satisfy RMS' philosophy that you pay for the creation of code, not the use or
redistribution of it.

[1] This is not a disparagement of KiCAD, it started much later and it is
going through much the same evolution of other tools that started decades
before it.

[2] This number is pulled out of the air because it is also a problem of
identifying how many people would like this feature, could be 10 could be
10,000.

------
melling
Stallman lacks a coherent vision. He has an end goal but he really doesn't
have a great plan to get there. It's really frustrating. Emacs could be a lot
better. For instance, it has taken forever to get a high-performance Lisp
working inside of Emacs. I think Guile is partly there?

Anyway, since we'll all be long dead before his plan starts to work, I think
the better solution is to support inexpensive software. For example, I pay for
Sublime Text. Recently I bought PixelMator and Sketch, and I'm planning on
learning how to use them soon. :-)

Sure it would be great if Free Software ruled but faster change comes with a
paid ecosystem. The real problem was that software was expensive. If it's
simply inexpensive, we'll get most of what we need.

~~~
streptomycin
The real problem was that software was expensive??

Also, I don't know how much of the success/failure of FOSS can be pinned on
RMS. He's just one man. The plan was never for the entire movement to be
dependent on him.

~~~
camdez
Moreover, the amount of work that he has done towards this end is
_incredible_. His productivity (at _least_ in the early days of GNU) was
astounding and inspiring. Perhaps one RMS didn't get us there, but two? Or
five? It'd be a treat to know what that would have looked like.

------
adamnemecek
Out of curiosity, what is Stallman a doctor of? Wikipedia says that he did not
finish his Ph.D. Or is that one of the honorary doctorates he received?

~~~
rimantas
It's a pain to see "Dr" next to bullshit like this:

    
    
      > "Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software."
    

You don't like skype, fine. I am prety sure what it enables millions of people
to do: freely communicate no matter the distance, but I don't really get what
freedoms it denies. Do I lose som freedom just but installing it, or must I
use it for that to take an effect?

~~~
terhechte
Freedom, in Stallmans words, is not meant to be 'free as in beer' (like free
skype calls). Instead he refers to the freedom to read, modify, understand,
and ultimately _choose_ everything about the software that you use. I.e. be
able to answer these questions (say about Skype):

\- Is any communication not properly encrypted

\- Is your communication being spied on / being recorded

\- Is there a way to add feature "x" to the application

\- Is there a way to remove feature "x" from the application

\- Is there a way to use the application on your specific hard / software

With Skype, none of that is possible. You can't see what's happening with your
Skype calls internally, you can't see if there's somebody else listening. If
Skype comes out with a new interface, and you really don't like it, you can't
change it, if Skype removes support for older operating systems that you just
happen to have to use because your IT department still wants to run Windows
XP, then you can't support, change or fix any of it.

Of course, Skype is a free product, so you may say the proverbial never look a
gift horse in the mouth, but Emacs is also a free product, and provides all
these benefits I listed above.

You have to understand Stallman as someone who is concerned about the future,
not so much about the now. Right now using Skype is all fine, but imagine the
world in 20 years time, when everything is connected to software, and every
movement you make is tracked. Wouldn't it be nice if all the software then
would be fully transparent, allowing you to see every detail that is
happening, and change it all to your liking, without being afraid of what
happens if you do this or that.

Sounds like an utopist dream right? And Stallman is the guy who tries to fight
for it, however unwinnable the fight may seem.

~~~
guygurari
Fair enough. But then he says:

> Use Ekiga or an ordinary phone call.

Let's go over your list for an ordinary phone call. Here the 'client app' is
your phone terminal, and the 'server' is the phone operator.

> \- Is any communication not properly encrypted

Yes, it's not encrypted at all.

> \- Is your communication being spied on / being recorded

I would say yes, at a similar level of probability as a skype call.

> \- Is there a way to add feature "x" to the application

> \- Is there a way to remove feature "x" from the application

The specs for the phone terminal are not open-source, so you can only do that
with some hacking. The same is true for skype, even though there it might be
more complicated technically.

> \- Is there a way to use the application on your specific hard / software

Irrelevant for a physical phone.

The main difference between the skype client and a phone, is that a phone
follows an open protocol, and therefore you can build your own. This is the
only reason I can think of why using a phone is 'free' while using skype is
not. But I think that if the skype protocol was made open, Stallman would
still argue that it is not free and therefore should not be used, and
therefore I do not understand his argument.

~~~
lmm
> Yes, it's not encrypted at all.

Right, but at least you can _tell_. No-one knows whether the encryption Skype
claims to be applying actually works. And you can integrate an encryption
system into a phone if you want to, whereas if you try and do that with skype
they'll change the client so that your thing doesn't work any more.

> The specs for the phone terminal are not open-source, so you can only do
> that with some hacking.

Speak for yourself. There are open source phones available if you want them.
There are no open-source skype clients.

> Irrelevant for a physical phone.

Sure. But I don't have to use a physical phone. I can run a virtual phone on
my freebsd box, whereas I can't run skype.

> The main difference between the skype client and a phone, is that a phone
> follows an open protocol, and therefore you can build your own. This is the
> only reason I can think of why using a phone is 'free' while using skype is
> not.

That's not a small difference; I'd say it's the most important difference.

------
Toenex
I've always felt it was this kind of thinking that puts Emacs at odds with the
UNIX philosophy of _do one thing well_. Unless your _one thing_ is everything-
you-can-do-with-text.

~~~
invalidOrTaken
Emacs is a conscious computer virus with the aim of hollowing Unix out
function by function, eventually to overthrow it. It's like a vampire: a
shadow of what made it beautiful in life (elisp vs the old lisp machines),
sustained mostly by blood (of its new users) and its long-term goal of
revenge.

~~~
groups
I read this comment and got so mad that I looked at your previous comments and
submissions. They seem high-quality.

I think I concede that I didn't get your joke. Oops. :)

If you're being serious, FLAME ON.

~~~
invalidOrTaken
Believe it or not, I'm actually a diehard emacs fan. That's why I buy into its
mythology enough to make jokes about it :).

------
mathattack
_Could people please start working on the features that are needed?_

As someone aware of gnu, but not an active participant, how effective are
requests like this? Does "Can people start working on this?" actually get
results? I'm curious as this gets to the heart of why they may have trouble
finishing things. (You can't toss money at someone to do the dirty work)

I'm coming with an open mind, and would like to hear either side of this.

------
motters
Personally I think that orgmode is more useful than WYSIWYG

------
daleharvey
I love emacs, and although I have long tried switching to other editors (I am
fairly determined to use web based applications only, brackets is getting
close) I havent been able to replace it yet.

However its the only application I didnt know how to copy and paste in when I
started using it, its still the only application I use that I dont know how to
resize the text in.

It would be kinda nice to see people work on those type of things.

~~~
Figs
> _I am fairly determined to use web based applications only_

That sounds really unpleasant to me. Why on earth would you want to do that?

~~~
daleharvey
Because I likely dont think the things you relate to web software being
unpleasant are inherent to the actual platform and can be fixed, both by 3rd
parties producing better web based software and by the platforms themselves
being fixed.

That combined with the advantages of having a single, cross platform runtime
platform that is shared as opposed to owned as being too important to ignore,
I think its silly that people have to consider writing the same app 3 times at
a minimum to reach a reasonable portion of the audience.

~~~
Figs
My biggest issue with web apps is that I don't have control of the software --
someone else can unilaterally decide to change the interface or functionality
from day to day. (GMail is an example of a case that regularly irritates me by
doing this.)

While I appreciate what you're saying about a common, open runtime being
valuable -- I've considered using a self-contained, special purpose browser as
the GUI for a project before myself -- I feel like web apps give users _less_
freedom ultimately. Even in the worst case proprietary desktop app with nasty
DRM, I could resort to reverse engineering the executable on my machine to
find out what it does if I really had to; as soon as you move the computation
to a remote server, you're totally at the whim of the operator for the
continued ability to even access the program.

Edit: Removed redundant phrasing.

~~~
icebraining
Seems like Firefox OS' packaged web apps (shipped as a zip file) solves those
issues without losing the common runtime benefits.

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/Apps/Publishing/Packaged...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/Apps/Publishing/Packaged_Apps)

~~~
lmm
If you just want a common runtime, what's wrong with java apps (or the CLR or
similar efforts)?

(I mean yes, performance sucks and swing looks terribly ugly, but those were
once the same problems on the web; they're not unsolvable by any means)

~~~
icebraining
_If you just want a common runtime, what 's wrong with java apps_

Oracle v. Google. By CLR I assume you mean the CLI, but only a fool would
trust a "standard" controlled by MS and driven by a proprietary
implementation, not to mention that the latest version doesn't even have a
patent promise from them.

~~~
lmm
Oracle lost the lawsuit, except for the part where Google literally copied one
of their classes.

~~~
icebraining
And all they had to do was pay Keker & Van Nest for two years, without knowing
whether they'd win or not - and Google didn't even make a VM that can run Java
apps!

Not to mention that Oracle has appealed, so we still don't know if Google is
clear or not.

If you want to risk getting yourself or your company involved in that
quagmire, by all means do so.

~~~
lmm
This is FUD, pure and simple. Anyone can be sued for anything.

~~~
icebraining
Oracle has already - and is currently - suing for implementing a competing
JVM. It's not FUD to suggest they might do it again.

FUD is what Oracle is doing; blame them, not me.

------
pkaler
The thing about "What You See Is What You Get" is that you have to define
'where you get it'. You have to define 'it'.

The implementation will look vastly different if you define 'where' as a
printer, desktop, tablet, mobile phone, wearable device, etc. It sounds like
RMS means his desktop/laptop computer. On the upside, you have a user
archetype: Richard Stallman. A good product manager would start building up a
list of user stories:

    
    
      - As Richard Stallman, I want *goal* so that *benefit*.

~~~
coldtea
> _The implementation will look vastly different if you define 'where' as a
> printer, desktop, tablet, mobile phone, wearable device, etc._

Not since more than a decade ago, when we started using the same rendering
infrastructure (e.g Display Postscript, Quartz, Cairo, what Windows uses etc)
for both print and display.

In fact nowadays, with hidpi (retina) displays, you even get similar
resolution between the average print and monitor.

~~~
pkaler
I have a couple HTML documents open on my MacBook, iPad, and iPhone. All three
look different.

I opened a couple of eBooks on Kindle and iBooks on my MacBook, iPad, and
iPhone. All three look different.

All three use Display Postscript, CoreGraphics and Quartz. All three look
different. WYSIWG depends on where.

I don't own a printer, but I bet if I printed from all three devices all three
documents would look different.

~~~
nknighthb
HTML and CSS are very, _very_ explicitly _not_ WYSIWYG. Their specifications
are crystal clear on this point. The same HTML document can and should be
displayed differently depending on device.

Your ebooks are also not WYSIWYG. They're also specifically designed to
display differently on different devices, and according to user preferences
for things like font, text size, brightness, background, line spacing, etc..

WYSIWYG is exactly the _opposite_ of these formats, and does _not_ depend on
the device. Postscript and PDF are WYSIWYG.

------
joosters
Quick! Someone add emacs bindings to MS Word, change the styling a little bit,
and we can get Stallman to unknowingly be using the devil's software :)

~~~
Sanddancer
The first part's done, at least:
[http://sourceforge.net/projects/womacs/](http://sourceforge.net/projects/womacs/)

------
zvrba
Is this Stallman-humor?

~~~
fest
I even checked the calendar- for a second I thought it's the first of April.

~~~
k__
Stallman always seems like a caricature of himself to me.

I think he did the world good deeds, but fun that gets made of him and the
stuff he says himself are indistinguishable to me.

------
jmount
We've already run the experiment and seen what happens when people try to
collaborate with the Gnu Emacs team (jwz, lemacs, xemacs).

------
catmanjan
Neat. Really. I really want to use emacs but I find it hard to justify
learning all it's intricacies when I'm only going to use it at certain times
while programming.

This kills two birds with one stone, gets me off MS Office and into keybind
heaven

~~~
pmr_
For some people Emacs acts like a maelstrom for everything you do on a
computer. In the beginning you use it to code in one language, then in another
language, then you use it for (La)TeX, then you use it as an organizer, then
you use it to read your mail, then your RSS feeds, then you embed it into
text-fields in your web browser...

At some point everything that does not act like Emacs feels annoying and
uncooperative. That justifies the learning curve easily.

~~~
rout39574
Amen. Think of 20 years using the grossly identical UI for all those disparate
tasks... How much time do you think you lose learning the little quirks of a
new app just because you're typing things inside a differently labelled box?

And then you can script or macro all of those processes using the same set of
concepts...

------
leephillips
Reminded me of this: [http://www.ibiblio.org/Dave/Dr-
Fun/df200002/df20000210.jpg](http://www.ibiblio.org/Dave/Dr-
Fun/df200002/df20000210.jpg)

------
blisterpeanuts
I like enriched-mode for simple markup purposes, like bolding headers. It's
nothing spectacular, but makes an on-screen document that much more readable,
and it doesn't add that much bulk to a text file, just a few extra markup
directives.

It's easy to use, too. Select the text, ALT-o b = bold, and so forth.

Still, a true WYSIWYG editing mode would be cool once in a while. Although,
it's not that much trouble to select text and paste into a nearby LibreOffice
window for true formatting.

------
gavinlynch
I wonder what is preventing Stallman from doing it himself? It is, after all,
open source.

~~~
informatimago
Time. He is quite busy with conferences and FSF stuff.

~~~
gavinlynch
Time? It's been 25 years.

------
jheriko
but we have many great wysiwig editors... isn't emacs specifically for all the
people who want a highly configurable weird and wonderful dev tool and care
little about wysiwig because they are writing code etc.?

i don't agree with what those kinds want.. but they should be allowed to have
it. :)

------
danielweber
How about making emacs close when I hit the "close window" button on Windows
7?

~~~
pit
Do you start emacs.exe or runemacs.exe?

~~~
danielweber
Manually runemacs.exe, but I'm not sure which mode Windows has chosen to auto-
associate with *.log files.

------
petdance
Dear Mr. Stallman,

I don't think that's how open source works, but hey, can't hurt to ask.

------
whydo
Why don't we have both: a WYSIWYG Designer, and a Source code editor?

That way you get productive immediately with the designer, yet still have the
power to fine-tune every detail using the text editor.

~~~
pjmlp
You mean like Oxygen, just to mention one of them?

[http://www.oxygenxml.com/xml_editor/WYSIWYG_Editors.html](http://www.oxygenxml.com/xml_editor/WYSIWYG_Editors.html)

There are quite a few products already, for those willing to pay for the
software they use.

~~~
informatimago
Seems nice, but it is not freedom software. But I would move to use this
docbook, ie xml and xsl as external file formatd for an emacs word processor.

~~~
pjmlp
Freedom software?!

I use a lot of FOSS software, but I never put religion over convenience.

Plus, as someone that earns money selling software developer skills, I tend to
look down to companies using FOSS software as free beer.

------
callesgg
How are one supose to get usefull wysiwg in the console. You are basicly
restricted to bold and a few colors.

I guess that could work but when i want anything useful like larger font size.
Then what?

------
gnuvince
No thank you; I like Emacs as a text editor, and if I need a word processor,
there are alternatives out there. No need to make Emacs even more complex.

------
minor_nitwit
I'm surprised there's no shortcut for this.

------
thatmiddleway
Take a look at asciidocs, really a great solution.

------
dmead
ironic he recommends regular phone calls which use software that is not free
to just using skype

