Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

lists.gnu.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 186 posts

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

#161

Post by reubensutton »

xeroxmalf wrote: post #87
melling wrote: post #82

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…

I find the $70 for a text editor (sublime) to be expensive. Price is relative.

I have used Sublime for around 50 hours a week, every week, for 20 months, when looked at like that, it is a bargain at about 1.5 cents an hour.

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

#163

Post by belorn »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #155

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 proce…

> called Libre Office these days, but that isn't what RMS wants.

If you bothered to read the mail thread, you would see that RMS answer that specific question. The answer he gave was that Libre Officer do not have the multi-buffer system of emacs, and the core design is not made to be a lisp interpreter. As such, adding emacs like features to libre office would unlikely work effectively in the libre office project.

It would simply be easier and less work to modify emacs to do WYSIWYG, then adding emacs work flow and emacs features to libre office.

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

#164

Post by belorn »

eropple wrote: post #141
rimantas wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just stupid dream not utopist. Having access to source code would me absolutely nothing, unless you are willing to check the actual code installed on the each system involved in communication chain. Back to the point: Skype does not give me some freedom, fine. But it denies zero freedoms too.

> But it denies zero freedoms too. By their philosophy, it does. If that feels hand-wavey to you I would agree; I find the whole "define 'freedom' as 'things I want'" thing more than a little sneaky--but it is consistent with the rest of their philosophy.

Would you be against defining freedom as synonym with liberty, and thus see the FSF philosophy as one that adapts the philosophy of liberty of old to the digital age?

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

#165

Post by ChuckMcM »

ajross wrote: post #159
ChuckMcM wrote: post #155

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 proce…

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). Somet…

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.

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

#166

Post by scenicBulimic »

delluminatus wrote: post #147
terhechte wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, he doesn't surf the web: "I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see git://git.gnu.org/womb/hacks.git) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page dire…

Is this purely for anonymity purposes, as he seems to imply? It seems like quite the workflow when a (relatively) modern anonymity tool like Tor would probably be fine. I wonder if it's deliberately complex to discourage easy, shallow browsing, or if he has some other rationale.

TOR is bullshit because it's a festering pile of assholes all trying to pretend that no one knows what no one is doing, without knowing who's doing the pretending not to know.

  C'mon, guys, I'm serious. Please don't sniff my
  exit node. It's not nice, you know! We're all
  supposed to be mysterious strangers, and not know
  each other, but still implicily trust all participants
  even though we'd never do that in real life. And oh, by 
  the way, here's a browser bundle that still uses
  third party cookies, and runs javascript by default,
  but fuck the world, because javascript is hella 
  convenient, and animated web pages are just super cool!
Yeah, that sounds really fucking secure to me.

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

#167

Post by blue1 »

pjmlp wrote: post #135
coldtea wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ed…

> 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). We also had PageMaker, FrameMaker, Word Perfect, Ami Pro.

Framemaker is still alive and well, although confined to the niche of technical publishing.

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

#168

Post by minor_nitwit »

Derbasti wrote: post #94

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…

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.

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

#170

Post by chris_mahan »

groups wrote: post #153
Toenex wrote: post #39

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.

Yes I think Emacs' philosophy is at odds with UNIX philosophy; I also think it's /superior to/ UNIX philosophy. It sounds like you take UNIX philosophy to be gospel, and deviation from that to be incorrect. I'm not trying now to convert you to Emacs' philosophy. Rather I think there are a lot of people who only know UNIX philosophy, when in fact there are alternatives.

The Unix philosophy addresses this as well, in Eric S. Raymond's The Art of Unix Programming: Rule 12: Rule of Diversity: Distrust all claims for "one true way". (See http://catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch01s06.html#id2879... )
Post reply on HN