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

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2013-11/msg00515.html

by ics • 13 years ago

288 178 13 years ago

lists.gnu.org

zvrba• 13 years ago

Is this Stallman-humor?

mayneack• 13 years ago

Stallman-humor is what's happening now on csail-related

https://lists.csail.mit.edu/pipermail/csail-related/2013-Nov...

fest• 13 years ago

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

k__• 13 years ago

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.

Myrmornis• 13 years ago

Agree, the thread's hilarious! My favorite so far:

  I think our interface will be so different
  from actual Word that no one will get confused.

Yes, I think there's a fair chance of that.

catmanjan2• 13 years ago

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_• 13 years ago

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.

rout395743• 13 years ago

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...

tikhonj• 13 years ago

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.

catmanjan2• 13 years ago

Maybe WYSIWYG emacs should use LaTeX on the backend?

thebooktocome• 13 years ago

LaTeX compilation has never really been fast enough for WYSIWYG, and good luck trying to optimize it.

coldtea4• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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.

pjmlp3• 13 years ago

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.

pseut2• 13 years ago

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"

ezequiel-garzon• 13 years ago

What about TeXmacs [1]? I'm not a heavy emacs or (La)TeX user, but when I tried it it felt amazing, with the best of both worlds.

[1] http://www.texmacs.org

ginko• 13 years ago

I was about to suggest this.

nova• 13 years ago

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

mbreese• 13 years ago

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

dcalacci• 13 years ago

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

So org-mode has you covered there, basically. Org isn't markdown, but it's close (and full of tons of note-taking features), and you can do inline latex with live preview in org-mode. I use it for notes all the time.

gcr• 13 years ago

inline latex with live preview in org-mode

This certainly isn't the default. Could you elaborate more on how you set this up?

Edit: Found my answer. M-x org-preview-latex-fragment, which is bound to C-c C-x C-l.

Edit 2: Hey look, you can get tikz working! Evaluate or add this to your .emacs:

    (add-to-list 'org-latex-packages-alist '("" "tikz" t))
    (setq org-latex-create-formula-image-program 'imagemagick)

Then, type the following into an Org-mode document and press C-c C-x C-l:

    \begin{tikzpicture}[scale=0.1]
    \draw[fill=green] (3,0) circle (9);
    \draw[fill=orange] (1,0) circle (5);
    \draw[fill=blue] (0,0) circle (3);

\end{tikzpicture}

computer• 13 years ago

LyX is a great LaTeX WYSIWYM editor: http://www.lyx.org/

peatmoss2• 13 years ago

Though I end up just using LaTeX (with memoir class) most of the time, I've always thought LyX hit a sweet spot between strict enforcement of document structure and forcing people to write markup.

For the life of me, I can't figure out why LyX doesn't exist as a collaborative google docs style web app.

Perseids• 13 years ago

If have come to greatly appreciate Lyx' [1] WYSIWYMean approach. When you are mostly writing code or plaintext markdown is great, but if you have to typeset and edit a lot of formulas using Tex quickly becomes a pain. Lyx allows you to edit them graphically with the standard Tex syntax and displays them while you type which is a huge improvement to just rendering them after you have finished it. Unfortunately the videos I've found online all heavily use the mouse interface to choose subscript, special characters etc. which doesn't do Lyx' real efficiency via keyboard shortcuts justice.

If you want to try it yourself: The most important commands are [ctrl]+[m] to enter math mode (or [ctrl]+[shift]+[m] for display formulas) and [alt]+[m] for a lot of math shortcuts, specifically [alt]+[m] and then any bracket to open matching size adapting brackets of this type. To enter a sum for example press "[ctr]+[shift]+[m]\sum[space]_k=1[space]^\infty[space][space]\frac[space]1[down arrow]k^2[space][space][space]". The shortcut [alt]+[p] and then [space] to choose the paragraphs meaning (section, itemize, standard, …) is also a huge productivity boost.

[1] http://www.lyx.org/WhatIsLyX

Shorel• 13 years ago

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

pkaler2• 13 years ago

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*.

coldtea4• 13 years ago

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.

pkaler2• 13 years ago

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.

daleharvey5• 13 years ago

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.

jadyoyster• 13 years ago

C-x C-+ increases font size, C-x C-- decreases font size if that's what you were looking for.

daleharvey5• 13 years ago

Heh C-+ / C-- actually work, at least in my emacsforosx, have no idea when that started working, but nice, one complaint off my list, but its not hard to imagine many more to make emacs more user friendly

gcv• 13 years ago

Try this:

    (defun set-font (font-family height)
      (interactive "sFont family: \nnHeight: ")
      (set-face-attribute 'default nil :family font-family :height height)
      (set-fontset-font "fontset-default" 'unicode font-family))

Then, if you have the right font installed, the following will work:

    (set-font "Monaco" 140) ; for 14-pt Monaco

or, e.g.,

    (set-font "Anonymous" 120) ; for 12-pt Anonymous

(M-x set-font also works.)

hollerith• 13 years ago

It's got a very nice way of handling text size and other text "attributes". All the various kinds ("faces") of text are arranged in an inheritance hierarchy, so a change in the size of the text in the base of the hierarchy propagates to all of the text in the application (minus the size of the text in the title bar, which is of course controlled by the operating system).

So for example, to make all Emacs text (except the title-bar text) pretty darn big, you just eval the following:

(set-face-attribute 'default nil :height 200)

pseut2• 13 years ago

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. :)

daleharvey5• 13 years ago

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

Figs2• 13 years ago

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?

daleharvey5• 13 years ago

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.

adamnemecek• 13 years ago

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?

chaz• 13 years ago

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honorary_degree

Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation in the field of Information Technology, has been awarded nine honorary doctorates from various international educational institutions from 1996 through 2011 including the North American Lakehead University in 2009, and now refers to himself as "Dr. Richard Stallman" in speeches, talks, videos and email.

shanselman• 13 years ago

Um. Wow.

shin_lao• 13 years ago

In that case it would be more appropriate to use "Dr.h.c. Richard Stallman".

rimantas3• 13 years ago

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?

chrisdevereux2• 13 years ago

  > Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software.
  > Use Ekiga or an ordinary phone call.

It made me wonder what's free-er about an ordinary phone call. Presumably, most of the software the phone companies use is also proprietary.

Does it become less non-free if somebody else runs the software? Or maybe it shifts the moral burden of using something non-free to somebody else?

tunesmith• 13 years ago

Stallman has a page on this that explains why he says this:

http://stallman.org/skype.html

swah• 13 years ago

OTOH he wrote software you and I probably couldn't... and gave it for free.

new299• 13 years ago

You can choose to be denied a freedom, quite obviously. If you choose to use Skype you are granted the ability to make free Skype calls. You are denied the freedom to:

* Freely distribute * Modify * Read the source code.

Among others, so it's a trade off. One that Stallman disagrees with and believes denies you too many freedoms.

Stallman is a weird guy, and hardly a pragmatist. But I don't think the things he says can be described as Bullshit, they are largely internally consistant. And to be frank, given the NSA revelations, I think we need rather more weird idealists than less.

Dr new299

interpol_p• 13 years ago

It's extremely hard to agree with Stallman, but you have to admire the fact that he lives by his principles.

He truly believes the world would be a better place if all software was free, and he lives his life in support of that. People rarely devote their lives to a single principle like that.

Skype might be convenient and wonderful in the short term, Stallman believes that supporting it is not the right step for society in the long term.

terhechte2• 13 years ago

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.

curiousdannii• 13 years ago

It denies freedom to the software more than freedom to the person. For copyleft licences the software is most important; for permissive licences people are most important.

baby• 13 years ago

there is no relation between "Dr" and his rant about Skype.

You would not believe the number of PHD who are not that intelligent (to be nice). Also Stallman is a master in its profession and "Dr", who is just acquired by doing a Phd, seems to me like it's not doing him enough justice.

joosters• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

The first part's done, at least: http://sourceforge.net/projects/womacs/

motters• 13 years ago

Personally I think that orgmode is more useful than WYSIWYG

gexla• 13 years ago

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.

rout395743• 13 years ago

When RMS says he's not familiar with a feature, you can believe him.

Org-mode is fantastic, but a very, very recent addition to the Emacs cosmology.

RBerenguel• 13 years ago

Depends on your definition of "very." It was created 10 years ago, this year. In the grand scheme of the emacs history, it's around a 3rd of the life of emacs already

reuven3• 13 years ago

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.

belorn8• 13 years ago

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.

terhechte2• 13 years ago

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 directly. I usually try lynx first, then a graphical browser if the page needs it." [1]

[1] http://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html

ewzimm• 13 years ago

In several instances, Stallman has asked people to complain to their representatives that bills posted online required running non-free Javascript on their computers in order to access them. I'm not sure if the instance you mention was influenced by this issue, but he does avoid reading things that require non-free software.

ecspike• 13 years ago

I totally agree. I started using Org mode when I was taking an algorithms course that required a bunch of LaTeX diagrams.

The ability to embed code to generate a diagram is clutch.

agumonkey• 13 years ago

I've seen Programming teachers requiring emacs for a course while not using anything it has to offer, not even as a programmable editor, and even displaying signs of anti-abstraction (no regularity in actions for a sequence of identical text modification tasks).

Toenex• 13 years ago

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.

belorn8• 13 years ago

Some projects are like that, because the synergy from a core functionality works well with added features. Its like how a window manager has menus and keyboard shortcuts even if its main purpose is to draw windows, or session managers are normally full working desktops.

Emacs do exactly one thing well (editing text), and a bunch of other things sort of OK. The sort of OK stuff is there because their core, they are about editing text. Like with an IDE, if the editing is crap, the ide is crap. As such, all IDE's require a good text editor to start with before they can do anything well.

invalidOrTaken2• 13 years ago

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.

jethro_tell• 13 years ago

Did you mean GNU/Emacs/hurd or GNU/Emacs/Linux

groups2• 13 years ago

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.

groups2• 13 years ago

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.

chris_mahan• 13 years ago

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... )

informatimago4• 13 years ago

emacs is entirely and wholy at odds with the UNIX philosophy, indeed. emacs is a Lisp Machine, running in a VM on unix. Read the Unix Hater Handbook for more info.

dspillett• 13 years ago

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".

rout395743• 13 years ago

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.

mathattack5• 13 years ago

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

jheriko• 13 years ago

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. :)

blisterpeanuts• 13 years ago

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.

melling• 13 years ago

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.

xeroxmalf• 13 years ago

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

reubensutton• 13 years ago

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.

mathattack5• 13 years ago

Is it that Stallman lacks a manager's mindset of breaking the vision into manageable pieces, and then delegating them out? Or is it that this is so against the ethos, that he couldn't make it happen with a volunteer workforce?

shubb• 13 years ago

Well, I guess if you consider his other interests, like the GNU Userland (which is most of what users recognise as linux), the GPL licsense (and generally 'Free Software'), and his part in the opening up of the software/hardware market...

I think this was a joke from Stallman. Your comment reads like we can conclude from EMACS going off track that he sucks as a leader. You and I might (quick strongly in my case) dislike Free Software, but I think we can recognise that Stallman gets things done.

If you want to point at a place where Stallman didn't succeed, I'd probably look more at Herd. At least people use Emacs.

streptomycin• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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.

30thElement• 13 years ago

You misunderstand the point of the FSF. It's free as in freedom, not free as in no money. The whole thing started because rms wanted to modify a printer driver to give functionality their last printer had. He wasn't being stingy, he just wanted his workflow back. The FSF has no problems with charging for software, they have no objection to Red Hat, for instance, charging for the GPL Linux kernel (although they have other problems with Red Hat). The FSF is concerned with users having access to the source, not with everyone being users or non-users having access to the source.

mathattack5• 13 years ago

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.

Derbasti3• 13 years ago

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.

bowerbird3• 13 years ago

i have read literally hundreds of threads discussing this general issue over the years, and i can say that this comment right here has come as close to the heart of the problem as any other one i've read in that time.

congratulations, derbasti, on your observational oxyopia.

-bowerbird

minor_nitwit2• 13 years ago

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.

Derbasti3• 13 years ago

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.

leephillips2• 13 years ago

Reminded me of this: http://www.ibiblio.org/Dave/Dr-Fun/df200002/df20000210.jpg

gavinlynch2• 13 years ago

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

informatimago4• 13 years ago

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

gavinlynch2• 13 years ago

Time? It's been 25 years.

danielweber3• 13 years ago

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

___1___• 13 years ago

Windows 7

Found the issue.

danielweber3• 13 years ago

That may very well be the problem, especially since on shutdown/logout Windows 7 always shows some items not closing, even if none are left. But emacs is about 50-50 on closing while other things always go away.

GNU Emacs 24.3.1 (i386-mingw-nt6.1.7601) of 2013-03-17 on MARVIN

bstamour• 13 years ago

It closes for me fine. Just tested it to be sure.

pit• 13 years ago

Do you start emacs.exe or runemacs.exe?

danielweber3• 13 years ago

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

shizzy0• 13 years ago

Oh, I thought that was the crash button.

Zigurd• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

a layout language with a preview window

aka digital typesetting

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 (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.

informatimago4• 13 years ago

I would not say it is naive. I wonder if it is an itch Stallman has had for 25 years, but it is certainly an itch I have. Not for me, I would do perfectly well without word processed documents, but for customers and coworkers, they like PDF if not powerpoint or MSWord documents.

For now, I have edited and generated them with reStructured Text, but the workflow is not entirely satisfactory (and I don't feel like dipping into python to improve things there, I would rather write rst document preprocessors in lisp when possible).

Another aspect is that if we improve the graphic abilities of emacs, it may be easier and faster to implement chrome like lighttable to attract newbies. Sublime Text probably has capted a percentage of users who would have chosen emacs, if it could have competed in the esthetic plane. Also, it is a little regretable to be limited to ascii art for the few diagrams that are sometimes needed in the documentations we write as programmers. If we could edit vectorial graphics in emacs, it would be great (we can already render svg, but perhaps thru an external program).

So I would not say naive, but on the contrary, it may condensate a critical mass of itches to motivate some scratches.

whydo• 13 years ago

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.

pjmlp3• 13 years ago

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

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.

informatimago4• 13 years ago

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.

jmount• 13 years ago

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

petdance• 13 years ago

Dear Mr. Stallman,

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

gnuvince• 13 years ago

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.

thatmiddleway• 13 years ago

Take a look at asciidocs, really a great solution.

ChuckMcM3• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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...

ChuckMcM3• 13 years ago

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.

belorn8• 13 years ago

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.

chipotle_coyote• 13 years ago

I don't see how what you just quoted contradicts Chuck's "[Libre Office] isn't what RMS wants" post. Libre Office is a free software WYSIWYG word processor with an extremely powerful feature set. But it isn't what RMS wants, because it doesn't have some things Emacs does.

It would be easier and less work to modify Emacs to do WYSIWYG than to add Emacs work flow and features to LibreOffice.

I'd suggest that you're vastly underestimating what would be involved in "doing WYSIWYG" to a sufficient degree that Emacs would actually be useful as a word processor to people who are not already dedicated Emacs users. I did read the mail thread, and it's pretty clear to me that a lot of the folks there -- and I do not mean to take away from their brilliance by saying this -- don't have a blinking clue what a full-featured word processor is capable of.

The reason that this hasn't been done, I suspect, is that the intersection of users for whom WYSIWYG is important and for whom having Emacs-ish features is important is virtually nil.

callesgg• 13 years ago

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?

minor_nitwit2• 13 years ago

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

dmead• 13 years ago

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

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

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