Re: Re[2]: Editing ConTeXt

[Hans Hagen <pragma@wxs.nl>]

At 12:20 AM 5/27/01 +0200, Giuseppe Bilotta wrote:
>
>Friday, May 25, 2001 Hans Hagen wrote:
>
>HH> At 01:25 PM 5/25/01 +0200, Giuseppe Bilotta wrote:
>
>>>* is there a way to "integrate" vim and texshow? I can launch
>>>texshow as the program to use to look up keywords, but while
>>>texshow is displayed, I cannot edit within the vim window.
>
>HH> i only use vim for special cases, never for large scale tex editing [for
>HH> which we use texedit], and some day i will look into emacs too 
>
>Is TeXedit some internal PRAGMA editing program?

indeed, it started as a fast and memory efficient windowing editor called
'wdt' on 8088 pc's, and in the begin 90's evolved into 'texedit' [and
'texform' i.e. a tex-template editor/runner and texadres i.e. mailing and
alike database editor]. There were not that many editors those days, and it
was also a nice exercise in programming and interfacing [quite symetrical
key binding so getting people started is easy]. Since it was all library
based, the core editing engine was also used for special purpose programs
[like our  pet-project of those days: controling a heavy duty mechanical
milling machine [a thing that cuts shapes from wood or plastic; built by an
inventor-friend of mine] where we needed to interface the editor to a
parser, numeric control, etc. Actually, we also made a computer assisted
learning environment around it, which was a nice lesson in parsing, 'poor
mans compiling', byte code handling, etc; this thread i will some day pick
up and bring into ConTeXt. We could make nice simulations in it, do a bit
of answer analysis, etc.] 

The advantage of texedit is that i can pretty quickly browse/access files
as well as that texedit knows about the context file project structure. Of
course there is (partial) running, based on config files, etc. etc. Since
the core engine is rather fast, we could even implement realtime syntax
highlighting, real time color based spell checking, etc on the 16mhz 386
4meg mem machines that we used for long. That was the time that i spat our
more modula-2 code than tex code and i must admit that i haven't touched
the modula code since years, since perl is rather well suited for many text
jobs [but the code looks ugly]]

Now, since i want to be able to run on windows as well as linux, i made
texwork, i.e. a perl/tk based counterpart of texedit. Although it has some
more features, it's not yet fully tested and finished. In due time, texwork
[and for most users probably more interesting texform] will be available in
the distribution. I must admit that i'm not in that much hurry, since the
combinations texedit + fptex + gsview + acrobat works quite well on
windows.     

So, that's the picture, 

Hans      
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                                  Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE | pragma@wxs.nl
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