[TxMt] Re: First impressions

[Charilaos Skiadas]

On Jan 30, 2008, at 6:18 AM, Jenny Harrison wrote:

> Yeh, I am still here.  What a dream come true this would be!   I  
> don't see how split windows would give a work around for dragging  
> and dropping sections.
>
> -Jenny
>
>
> On 1/30/08, at 2:58 , Jacob Rus wrote:
>
>> Charilaos Skiadas wrote:
>>> Actually what would be even nicer, for me, would be to be able to  
>>> get an outline of your whole project, essentially listing the  
>>> table of contents, regardless of how many files the project is  
>>> split into, and then to be able to simply drag and drop sections  
>>> around to rearrange things. But I am probably just daydreaming.
>>
>> Yeah.  Jenny (and perhaps others) were talking about this a year  
>> ago, but it somehow still hasn't happened.  If someone builds such  
>> a thing, I'll gladly buy them a beer. :)

Part of the reason it still hasn't happened, apart from my almost  
zero free time to invest in TextMate programming for at least the  
last 6 months or so, is what seems to me to be the destructiveness of  
the whole thing. We are moving vast amounts of text around, possibly  
across multiple files, and it seems to me it would be hard to test  
whether the right thing happened. This is why I have been hesitant to  
do something like that (apart from the other reasons preventing me  
from doing it).

If everyone was using a version control system on all their tex files/ 
projects, I might be less worried about it.
I envisioned this as an HTML tree of the document, with those little  
triangles used for expanding or hiding the subtrees like in the  
bundle editor, and then drag and dropping sections around and  
tracking the thing via javascript. Should not be too hard once we  
have a reliable way to read the whole project in and get the overall  
structure figured out correctly and reliably.

>> -Jacob
>>

Haris Skiadas
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science
Hanover College