[TxMt] Re: C Library bundle MONSTER

[William D. Neumann]

On Thu, 7 Dec 2006, Charilaos Skiadas wrote:

> Because as I already said, I have already written these 10 lines of Ruby, and 
> the code is in the LaTeX bundle.

Which has its disadvantages over the snippet solution as well as its 
advantages.  Let's say you want to insert one a union symbol, but you 
can't remember the latex name for the symbol... What's easier, going into 
menus that take you along, say, math symbols -> set symbols -> Union 
(bigcup), or selecting Edit configuration file, looking for the symbol 
section, then reading through them until you find what looks right?

Not to mention that, frankly it can be pretty damn unintuitive.  Say you 
type in "cong" and you realize you forgot the preceeding \.  So you hit Cmd-\ 
and get back "complement" ??? Really?

OK, so that might not happen too often.  Say you want to insert a diamond, 
so you type "dia" then Cmd-\ and you get "dia" What?  Is this thing 
broken?  No... you need to start with "di" then hit Cmd-\ three times... 
of course!  God help you if you want bigcirc... nothing like 14 keypresses 
(12 with a modifier) for an 8 character symbol.

Basically what I'm saying is that it's not so trivial...  Sure, a somewhat 
less functional, yet more elegont version of the Monster bundle is trivial 
to whip up (one could likely even whip up a script to convert the snippets 
to an equivalent config file pretty quickly), but you are loosing the 
organization that goes with the bundle menus unless you're willing to use 
a more complex command.

> This is the opinion of at least five of the top 10 committers to the 
> repository, I wouldn't call it exactly "single-handed".

OK, five-handed.  And that's out of how many people pulling from the 
repository ond/or reading this mailing list?

Meh. Whatever, pull it if you must.  Just don't be surprised if people 
start messing with other bundles if they can get buy-in from a couple of 
others...

William D. Neumann

---

"There's just so many extra children, we could just feed the
children to these tigers.  We don't need them, we're not doing 
anything with them.

Tigers are noble and sleek; children are loud and messy."

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