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25 years ago I hoped we would extend Emacs to do WYSIWG word processing

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Re: 25 years ago I hoped we would extend Emacs to do WYSIWG word processing

#3

Post by 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

Re: 25 years ago I hoped we would extend Emacs to do WYSIWG word processing

#5

Post by 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.

Re: 25 years ago I hoped we would extend Emacs to do WYSIWG word processing

#6

Post by catmanjan »

tikhonj wrote: post #5

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 Stack…

Maybe WYSIWYG emacs should use LaTeX on the backend?

Re: 25 years ago I hoped we would extend Emacs to do WYSIWG word processing

#7

Post by 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*.

Re: 25 years ago I hoped we would extend Emacs to do WYSIWG word processing

#9

Post by 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.

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