Friday 24 November 2000 07:14 wrote Allan Rae:
> Actually, while I have your attention can I get you to answer a couple of
> questions for LDN? Lars, Asger and possibly JMarc also know the answers.
> This will help me get the "History of GUII" article complete and make the
> 10th issue of LDN really special.
Ok, here's my view:
>
> ##
>
> 1. When LyX first started you used Motif for the GUI. Why?
The very first version did not use Motif, but xviews. I liked the xviews look
and feel better and the library was available everywhere. I never released
that to the public, though.
But then I read in a book that Motif was going to be the standard in future
versions of Linux and I wanted to be prepared to use the standard.
I had access to the Motif libraries at the university, so the switch was no
problem.
>
> 2. Later on the decision was taken to switch to XForms. When and why?
There was no lesstiff back then, and no OpenMotif either. Only very few
people had access to Motif libraries, so the pool for potential co-developers
was too small. Most emails I got were requests to send them a statically
linked binary.
Somebody (can't remember who) sent me an email suggesting XForms and I fell
in love with the API and the GUI-designer (what a relief after Motif!).
>
> 3. Was there any discussion about switching toolkits again after this but
> before you left to found KDE?
>
> (I remember some discussion in late'96 IIRC about a possible switch to Qt
> but you had handed over LyX to Lars before then (you had handed over to
> Lars before I joined up). I still have to go through the old archive
> but since its glimpse engine is stuffed it means going through by hand
> -- an answer to this might help me find some links sooner)
IIRC there was talk to switch to Qt, which I considered the natural choice
after xforms development almost stagnated for years. Lars started working on
that and I believed it was going to happen. I was extremely busy with KDE, so
I didn't pay too much attention. Later I was quite dissappointed when I
noticed that this port was cancelled in favour for yet another xforms-based
release.
Lars, Asger and JMarc probably know more about that.
>
> ##
>
> As a special 10th issue of LDN treat:
>
> 4. LyX was originally called LyriX. Why? Who thought of that name?
> Why did it need to be changed? Who came up with LyX?
LyX was supposed to be a program to write "beautiful documents", just like
poems are beautiful texts. And it was an X11 application, so it needed an X
in there. So I ended up with LyriX (after lots of thinking ;).
The name was changed, when I learned about a commercial wordprocessor from
SCO that was using the same name. The idea to simply strip the name down to
LyX came from David Johnson. It fit very well with the filenames: those I
called *.lyx in good-old DOS fashion from the very beginning (I had to use an
MS-DOS floppy disk at this time to transport LyX and LyX-Files from the
university computers to my home).
Matthias
