13 ms·
25 years ago I hoped we would extend Emacs to do WYSIWG word processing
- zvrba 13y agoIs this Stallman-humor?
- mayneack 13y agoStallman-humor is what's happening now on csail-related https://lists.csail.mit.edu/pipermail/csail-related/2013-November/011841.html https://lists.csail.mit.edu/pipermail/csail-related/2013-Nov...
- fest 13y agoI even checked the calendar- for a second I thought it's the first of April.
- k__ 13y agoStallman 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 13y agoAgree, 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.
- catmanjan 13y agoNeat. 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
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- pmr_ 13y agoFor 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.
- rout39574 13y agoAmen. 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 13y agoWith 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.
- catmanjan 13y agoMaybe WYSIWYG emacs should use LaTeX on the backend?
- thebooktocome 13y agoLaTeX compilation has never really been fast enough for WYSIWYG, and good luck trying to optimize it.
- coldtea 13y 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.
- pkaler 13y agoThe 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*.
- coldtea 13y 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.
- pkaler 13y agoI 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.
- PeterisP 13y agoIt's because you're not looking at the data in a WYSIWYG environment. If I take an Acrobat document or MS Word document, print it, and look it next to my screen, I'd expect the layout and 'look' to be perfectly identical (barring blurriness due to one-or-others resolution limitations)
- nknighthb 13y agoHTML and CSS are very, very explicitly not WYSIWYG. Their specifications are crystal clear on this point. The same HTML document can and should be displayed differently depending on device. Your ebooks are also not WYSIWYG. They're also specifically designed to display differently on different devices, and according to user preferences for things like font, text size, brightness, background, line spacing, etc.. WYSIWYG is exactly the opposite of these formats, and does not depend on the device. Postscript and PDF are WYSIWYG.
- daleharvey 13y agoI 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 13y agoC-x C-+ increases font size, C-x C-- decreases font size if that's what you were looking for.
- daleharvey 13y agoHeh 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
- ordinary 13y agoNote that these keys zoom, they don't change the font size. Useful for displaying, not useful if you're looking to export or print text.
- FedRegister 13y agoWell, yeah. The whole point of a text editor it to edit plain text.
- gcv 13y agoTry 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.)
- adamnemecek 13y agoOut 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 13y agoFrom http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honorary_degree 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 13y agoUm. Wow.
- shin_lao 13y agoIn that case it would be more appropriate to use "Dr.h.c. Richard Stallman".
- rimantas 13y agoIt'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?
- chrisdevereux 13y 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?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- joosters 13y agoQuick! 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 13y agoThe first part's done, at least: http://sourceforge.net/projects/womacs/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/womacs/
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- motters 13y agoPersonally I think that orgmode is more useful than WYSIWYG
- gexla 13y 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.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- rout39574 13y agoWhen 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 13y agoDepends 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
- reuven 13y agoI 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.
- Toenex 13y agoI'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.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- belorn 13y agoSome 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.
- invalidOrTaken 13y agoEmacs 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 13y agoDid you mean GNU/Emacs/hurd or GNU/Emacs/Linux
- groups 13y agoI 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.
- invalidOrTaken 13y ago
- dspillett 13y agoI'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".
- rout39574 13y agoVisualize 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.
- mathattack 13y agoDoes this style of management work for them? I'm not close enough to know if this is all that it takes.
- craigching 13y agoRead the thread of comments, people take him seriously and are discussing the problem. I'd say, in the short term at least, it does work.
- mathattack 13y agoRight - but how about the long term? My experience in the corporate world is things start with momentum, but without a cop managing all the details, things don't get over the finish line. Does this method get projects over the finish line? I fully understand that it's unproductive to be a cop with high talent volunteers.
- jheriko 13y agobut 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 13y agoI 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 13y agoStallman 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 13y agoI find the $70 for a text editor (sublime) to be expensive. Price is relative.
- reubensutton 13y agoI 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.
- streptomycin 13y agoThe 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 13y agoMoreover, 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.
- mathattack 13y ago
- mathattack 13y agoCould 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.
- Derbasti 13y agoQuite 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.
- bowerbird 13y agoi 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_nitwit 13y agoI 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.
- Derbasti 13y agoI 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.
- leephillips 13y agoReminded me of this: http://www.ibiblio.org/Dave/Dr-Fun/df200002/df20000210.jpg http://www.ibiblio.org/Dave/Dr-Fun/df200002/df20000210.jpg
- gavinlynch 13y agoI wonder what is preventing Stallman from doing it himself? It is, after all, open source.
- informatimago 13y agoTime. He is quite busy with conferences and FSF stuff.
- gavinlynch 13y agoTime? It's been 25 years.
- danielweber 13y agoHow about making emacs close when I hit the "close window" button on Windows 7?
- ___1___ 13y ago> Windows 7 Found the issue.
- danielweber 13y agoThat 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 13y agoIt closes for me fine. Just tested it to be sure.
- pit 13y agoDo you start emacs.exe or runemacs.exe?
- danielweber 13y agoManually runemacs.exe, but I'm not sure which mode Windows has chosen to auto-associate with *.log files.
- shizzy0 13y agoOh, I thought that was the crash button.
- Zigurd 13y agoIs 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 13y agoa layout language with a preview window aka digital typesetting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typesetting#Digital_era 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 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.
- whydo 13y agoWhy 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.
- pjmlp 13y agoYou mean like Oxygen, just to mention one of them? http://www.oxygenxml.com/xml_editor/WYSIWYG_Editors.html 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.
- informatimago 13y agoSeems 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.
- pjmlp 13y agoFreedom software?! I use a lot of FOSS software, but I never put religion over convenience. Plus, as someone that earns money selling software developer skills, I tend to look down to companies using FOSS software as free beer.
- jmount 13y agoWe've already run the experiment and seen what happens when people try to collaborate with the Gnu Emacs team (jwz, lemacs, xemacs).
- maddddddddddddd 13y agowhat you see is what... get? richard stallman is an idiot.
- petdance 13y agoDear Mr. Stallman, I don't think that's how open source works, but hey, can't hurt to ask.
- gnuvince 13y agoNo 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 13y agoTake a look at asciidocs, really a great solution.
- ChuckMcM 13y agoThis 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 13y agoI 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...
- ChuckMcM 13y agoIt 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.
- callesgg 13y agoHow 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_nitwit 13y agoI'm surprised there's no shortcut for this.
- dmead 13y agoironic he recommends regular phone calls which use software that is not free to just using skype