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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

#21

Post by daleharvey »

pseut wrote: post #19
daleharvey wrote: post #9

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 t…

> 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. Ah, you must have never tried vim. :)

heh good point, 'use' in this context means more than the brief panic on a new machine when I remember :wq and add export EDITOR=emacs to my profile

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

#22

Post by pkaler »

coldtea wrote: post #12
pkaler wrote: post #7

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 lis…

> 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 pr…

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.

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

#25

Post by daleharvey »

Figs wrote: post #20
daleharvey wrote: post #9

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 t…

> 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?

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.

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

#26

Post by pseut »

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…

You might want to give plain TeX a try--it's surprisingly lightweight (once you learn how to change font sizes and/or decide not to care). A lot of the bloat comes from LaTeX and using 'eplain' will give you most of the crossreferencing and bibliography commands (if you need it). Running latexmk -pvc in a separate terminal will give you rebuilt dvis on the fly (or pdfs). AucTeX can generate inline previews for plain tex just as well as LaTeX.

Of course, org mode is the standard recommendation for "emacs based markdown replacement with inline math previews"

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

#27

Post by k__ »

fest wrote: post #8
zvrba wrote: post #2

Is this Stallman-humor?

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

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.

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

#29

Post by Figs »

daleharvey wrote: post #25
Figs wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

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 peop…

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.

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