As far as understand the main goal is a smooth transition from X11 to
a modern GUI library (which for the moment is Qt). We proceed by
perfecting the qt plugins with minimal changes to the core texmacs in
such a way to guarantee the coexistence of the two interfaces. This
will allow a smooth transition from the current codebase which is
quite stable and well tuned (wrt interactive usage) to a more modern
one based on current GUI toolkits ( Qt, Cocoa, wx, wathever). Indeed
the main difficulty is the fact that the current codebase is not
really designed to interact well with modern frameworks (event loop, I/
O interaction, standard dialogs, etc...). there are many assumptions
which are easy to guarantee with X11 (or maybe glut or similar low
level libraries) but almost impossible to achieve in any reasonable
modern or cross-platform envirnoment (one for all is that texmacs has
a very precise idea of the sequencing of operations: input, update,
redrawing) which is quite difficult to emulate with natural Qt code.
many of the problems we encountered in developing the qt interface are
linked to the more or less implicit assumptions we broke in devising
the qt version of some X11 constructs. this is still a not very
pleasant activity, for example we still have some problems at the
level of socket interaction with plugins. the adantage of this
conservative approach is that we have always a reliable base of
comparison. I think that soon ( winter?) we will start to modify
texmacs internals to remove some of these implicit assumptions which
hinders developement of more idiomatic qt code (the same assumptions
however block development of a nice cocoa interface) maybe by
branching the original codebase. at this moment we will start to
accept not to be backward compatible with x11 and more interesting
features will become amenables to addition.
as far as the choice of toolkit : i'm quite satisfied with qt even if
its behaviour is not quite uniform on different platform when used in
the quite unorthodox way texmacs forces us to do. maybe it would be
interesting to experiment with wx, surely i'm personally interested in
a Cocoa/gnustep port. but for the moment and given the scarcity of
programming resources we dispose of, consolidation of the qt port
remains the only reasonable objective to pursue on the short term.
programming texmacs can be frustrating sometimes but the final product
is good and useful enough that one has seldom the impression of
loosing its own time.
best
max
On 23 juil. 2010, at 15:59, Norbert Nemec <[email protected]>
wrote:
I'm not sure whether Qt is considered "stable" enough. But then -
the number of nuissances in the X11 GUI is certainly larger than the
number of bugs in the Qt GUI.
I don't see any reason to use Qt exclusively. There are several GUIs
in different states of maturity that are worth keeping. It is only
X11 that is so limited that I would suggest fading it out.
On 23/07/10 13:44, Alvaro Tejero Cantero wrote:
Is there any reason not to use the QT GUI everywhere? Any
architecture
that supports X11 but not QT?
-รก.
On Fri, Jul 23, 2010 at 11:33, Norbert Nemec<[email protected]
> wrote:
Hi there,
it was mentioned before that alpha-transparency should be
addressed in
TeXmacs. Apart from X11, all other GUIs should support this in a
straightforward way. Is there any idea, how it could be added to
the GUI
abstraction in the cleanest way so that TeXmacs graphics could
begin making
use of it?
Specifically, it would be essential for the table border hints
that I
attempted to implement a while ago. Currently, the hints are opaque
light-gray and get in the way for equations where the content
often extends
over the cell boundaries. Putting the hints in the background
behind the
content was not a solution either, because nested tables would
then cover
the hints of inner tables by the background color of outer tables.
The most difficult issue for extending the GUI abstraction seems
to be a
fallback solution for the X11 GUI and possibly other that do not
offer alpha
transparency. Once alpha transparency is used for anything
essential in
TeXmacs, these GUIs would become unusable.
Is it time to drop the X11 GUI? Or at least accept that future
versions will
make it less and less usable as alpha transparency is being used
for more
and more features in TeXmacs? It could still be included as legacy
code, but
I believe it will slow down the development of TeXmacs in general
if every
piece of code is restricted to the limitations of the X11 GUI.
Greetings,
Norbert
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