Re: [Texmacs-dev] Re: TeXmacs+Axiom

[Ralf Hemmecke]

On 05/22/2007 10:24 AM, Joris van der Hoeven wrote:
> On Mon, May 21, 2007 at 10:40:00PM +0200, Ralf Hemmecke wrote:
> > > > I just installed TeXmacs (version 1.0.6 on kubuntu), but I 
> > > > also have trouble getting it to work with axiom.  Additionally,
> > > > it seems extremely slow, but maybe that's due to my laptop
> > > > showing its age.
> > > Probably both. Even on a reasonably fast dual processor
> > > AMD 4300+ X2, I find TeXmacs rather slow compared to most
> > > other apps.
>
> This is rubbish

Jorris, I don't know whether this is true, but I have the impression 
that many people complain about slowness of TeXmacs.

So let's assume there are many people that turn their back to TeXmacs, 
because they just think it is slow. If somebody really considers to use 
TeXmacs, I would not say that s/he is one of the most stupid people in 
the world. So if you don't believe what such people say then you lose a 
lot of people who actually find TeXmacs attracting, but don't want to 
use it because they feel it is slow. Yes, I really said "feel". That 
does not necessarily mean that TeXmacs is in fact slow, it just means 
that those people "feel" slowness in TeXmacs response compared to 
editors like vim or emacs. Sure TeXmacs does more in terms of nice 
output (which costs time) and less in terms of functionality (no support 
for programming), but it is a psychological effect. Take me, for 
example, one day I tried the mozilla mailer and found it rather slow 
compared to my previous one. Well, I later found out that all this 
unresponsiveness was caused because the spell checker was switched on 
and too much time for my taste.

> and only the case if you use TeXmacs in particular ways,
> i.e. over a network,

Do you think the ordinary user does this? Everyone would expect a delay 
in such a case.

> when compiling without optimizations,

Hopefully not an issue if I use a debian package.

> when putting large pieces of the document in certain markup like tables,
> or having a document of several hundreds of pages.

Oh, I probably would like a document, that is like a master file with 
hundreds of include files. I all want to see them as *one* (hyperlinked) 
document. If you now say that TeXmacs will be slow in this case, I know 
where I have to stop.

Remember for me it is not important that the 1000+ pages are always what 
I see when I print it. In fact, I probably will never print them. It is 
more important to have the hyperlinks (approximately) correct and the 
screen output reasonably nice. So a button to re-beautify would be 
totally fine for me.

I know, I enter an area here (literate programming) for which TeXmacs 
was probably not designed, but I wanted to see whether it would be 
reasonable to consider TeXmacs. Speed *is* an issue for almost any 
programmer.

> > Oh that is a big issue. I haven't yet used TeXmacs again extensively, 
> > but this slowness in keyboard response was one of the reasons I turned 
> > away about one or two years ago.

> Examples, timings?

How do you expect me to messure the timing between pressing a key and 
seeing on screen until nothing moves anymore? Of course, I understand 
that you want to see timings, but I don't know how to give them. 
Otherwise I would probably have sent a message two years ago.

But now I should stop and actually test TeXmacs, maybe things have 
change (like me having a faster laptop ;-) )

> > Hi, TeXmacs developers, is there a trick to delay expensive computations 
> > until I press a button "re-beautify"?

> Rendering is already done in that way.

Could you detail a bit? Or where do I find a description of how the 
delay process works. Please don't let me read code, I will probably not 
understand the essence.

BTW, is there an SVN archive of TeXmacs?

Ralf