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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

#151

Post by groups »

invalidOrTaken wrote: post #103
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.

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.

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.

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

#152

Post by wmf »

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.

IIRC he uses that email-based workflow because it allows him to work offline and he spends a lot of time traveling.

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

#153

Post by groups »

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.

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

#155

Post by 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 :-)

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

#156

Post by mbreese »

nova wrote: post #65
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…

So, Wordperfect 5.1's "reveal codes" from 1989.

I thought working in WordPerfect's text mode was an extremely easy and productive way to do document formatting. Then again, I still remember the little keyboard shortcut cheat sheet [1] at the top of our PC at home.

[1] http://www.retrothing.com/2006/06/wordperfect_51_.html

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

#158

Post by tedks »

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.

RMS just has a workflow, developed probably sometime in the late 80's and nearly only involving emacs. He also uses a Lemote Yeeloong (which can barely run ancient versions of IceCat), and runs it in a tty most of the time with just emacs.

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

#159

Post by ajross »

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). 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...

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

#160

Post by Shorel »

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…

And all that beauty was practically achieved by WordPerfect 6.0 for DOS, many years ago. IMHO.
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