Re: New TeXmacs version 2.1.5

Giovanni, Liza, thanks again for the useful hints!
Meanwhile I managed to solve some of the problems (with quite big efforts,
the source code of TeXmacs is still a mystery for me):

Giovanni Piredda <[email protected]> ezt írta (időpont: 2026. márc. 28.,
Szo, 15:21):

> > 2. Do you plan to support guile-2.2 or higher? Currently I need to
> > patch TeXmacs if I want to use guile-2.2 on Ubuntu 24.04 (when I want
> > to build it from source, just in case).
>

I learned how to compile the required version of guile (
https://github.com/texmacs/guile-texmacs): it is definitely a must to use
an older gcc version. In my case, gcc-12 works well, fortunately it is
still available on Ubuntu 26.04 too.


> > 3. How to implement a simple syntax highlighting feature for session
> > inputs for a certain language? I already spent a lot of time trying to
> > figure out how it is done with Python sessions, but I could not write
> > my own syntax highlighter for another language.
>

This is what to do:
1) Assume we want syntax highlighting for a new language, say "newlang". We
need to create the folder ~/.TeXmacs/plugins/newlang/progs/ first.
2) In this folder we need to put three files: newlang-format.scm with the
content
*(texmacs-module (newlang-format))*
*(define-format newlang (:name "newlang source code"))*
and another file newlang-lang.scm with the minimal example content







*(texmacs-module (newlang-lang) (:use (prog default-lang)))(tm-define
(parser-feature lan key)  (:require (and (== lan "newlang") (== key
"keyword")))  `(,(string->symbol key)    (keyword "print" "if" "and"
"other" "keywords")    (keyword_control "more")    (constant_module
"etc"))) ;; and so on...(define (notify-newlang-syntax var
val) (syntax-read-preferences "newlang"))*
and the third file init-newlang.scm with something like this:




*(plugin-configure newlang  (:require (url-exists-in-path? "newlang-cli"))
;; here newlang-cli is an interpreter (executable) for newlang  (:launch
"newlang-cli")  (:session "newlang"))(lazy-format (newlang-format) newlang)*
This last line was crucial and it took me several months to figure out.
Usually it already appears in the system-wide startup script
progs/init-texmacs.scm for the already working languages like python.
3) To enable this only for session inputs but not for session outputs and
session errors, we need to create the file
~/.TeXmacs/plugins/newlang/packages/session/newlang.ts
with some minimal content like
















































*<TeXmacs|1.99.19><style|source><\body>  <active*|<\src-title>
<src-package|newlang|1.0>    <\src-purpose>      Markup for newlang
sessions.    </src-purpose>    <src-copyright|2026|Your Name>
<\src-license>      Some license    </src-license>  </src-title>>
<\active*>    <\src-comment>      Use verbatim output    </src-comment>
</active*>  <assign|newlang-output|<\macro|body>
<\with|mode|text|language|verbatim|font-family|tt>      <\generic-output>
      <arg|body>      </generic-output>    </with>  </macro>>
<assign|newlang-errput|<\macro|body>
<\with|mode|text|language|verbatim|font-family|tt>      <\generic-errput>
      <arg|body>      </generic-errput>    </with>  </macro>>
\;</body><\initial>  <\collection>    <associate|preamble|true>
</collection></initial>*
I used Joris' .ts file for python with technically no modification.
4) A re-initialization of TeXmacs' settings may be required (I used the -S
option on command line).

A working example can be found at https://github.com/kovzol/bibref-book. In
particular, the file Dockerfile.texmacs-src builds TeXmacs from sources on
Debian Trixie (after tweaking two things: allowing underscore in keywords
in syntax highlighting and improving index ordering when numbers are
present), improves the Hungarian translation and displays a saved TeXmacs
document in an X11 window. I will provide a blog entry on this soon, but
maybe the summary above is useful for some of you. Should I fork TeXmacs on
GitHub, add these changes and send a pull request to make it possible to
incorporate them upstream?

I am still fighting with one issue: How can I switch off showing visible
spaces? TeXmacs automatically displays them in string contexts (that is,
between apostrophes or quotation marks) by using the "open box" character
(␣, Unicode U+2423). This is nice in many cases, but in my case it should
be avoided. Any ideas?

Thanks and best regards,
Zoltán

-- 

*Dr. Zoltán** Kovács, MSc*


*Private Pädagogische Hochschule der Diözese Linzhttps://matek.hu/zoltan
<https://matek.hu/zoltan>*