From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.devel Subject: Re: Emacs as word processor Date: Tue, 19 Nov 2013 17:04:14 +0900 Message-ID: <87ob5gg6m9.fsf@uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp> References: <5288A59E.7030109@dancol.org> <87vbzqfgd6.fsf@uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp> NNTP-Posting-Host: plane.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 X-Trace: ger.gmane.org 1384848276 12116 80.91.229.3 (19 Nov 2013 08:04:36 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@ger.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 19 Nov 2013 08:04:36 +0000 (UTC) Cc: dancol@dancol.org, emacs-devel@gnu.org To: rms@gnu.org Original-X-From: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Tue Nov 19 09:04:41 2013 Return-path: Envelope-to: ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from lists.gnu.org ([208.118.235.17]) by plane.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1VigIa-0006jI-TF for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org; Tue, 19 Nov 2013 09:04:41 +0100 Original-Received: from localhost ([::1]:47681 helo=lists.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1VigIa-0007ra-19 for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org; Tue, 19 Nov 2013 03:04:40 -0500 Original-Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:4830:134:3::10]:41836) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1VigIQ-0007qb-ID for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Tue, 19 Nov 2013 03:04:38 -0500 Original-Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1VigIJ-0001G8-7H for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Tue, 19 Nov 2013 03:04:30 -0500 Original-Received: from mgmt2.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp ([130.158.97.224]:58636) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1VigII-0001Ex-ML; Tue, 19 Nov 2013 03:04:23 -0500 Original-Received: from uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp (uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp [130.158.99.156]) by mgmt2.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1A82F970A0A; Tue, 19 Nov 2013 17:04:15 +0900 (JST) Original-Received: by uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp (Postfix, from userid 1000) id 0F1D91A27DD; Tue, 19 Nov 2013 17:04:15 +0900 (JST) In-Reply-To: X-Mailer: VM undefined under 21.5 (beta34) "kale" 182d01410b8d XEmacs Lucid (x86_64-unknown-linux) X-detected-operating-system: by eggs.gnu.org: GNU/Linux 2.6.x X-Received-From: 130.158.97.224 X-BeenThere: emacs-devel@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.14 Precedence: list List-Id: "Emacs development discussions." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Original-Sender: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.emacs.devel:165360 Archived-At: Richard Stallman writes: > I use TeX to write a manual, and also when I want to send a nicely > formatted letter; but I wish I could do the latter WYSIWYG in Emacs. OK. But I don't think that's a very big benefit compared to the amount of work entailed. It will be much easier (as somebody suggested already) to produce a variant set of keybindings for LibreOffice that more closely approximates Emacs bindings. As for accessing the power of Emacs from your wordprocessor, most office suites nowadays understand embedded URIs and/or MIME types, and can bind arbitrary applications to them. I would think that in many cases it should be possible to create "emacs:" URIs or an "application/emacs-lisp" MIME type that could be linked to (with the effect of using emacsclient to send code to a running Emacs process) to get various effects. Ugly, inefficient, and clumsy, but it probably could be made to work for a lot of use cases. > But there are so many people who don't use Emacs or TeX. They use > WYSIWYG word processors only. I wish we could make Emacs easy for > them to use, Now that is a goal we can all support, I'm sure. But please take into consideration that for 99% of the "so many people", "easy to use" is not just a matter of software UI (including display and layout features). It's mostly about file format support, and that support needs to be very high quality on input, output, and "throughput"[1] before more than a very few people will use it "in anger". This is going to take a huge amount of effort, a large fraction of that available to the Emacs projects for several years (a decade or so). Footnotes: [1] Office suites which are capable of reading most formats received, and outputting new files that are readable when transmitted to others, nevertheless frequently mangle files received from others in editing.