Michael Cwikel wrote:
First of all I want to express my huge admiration for the Lyx project and the immense good will, energy and talent of those who have made it happen and are continuing to develop Lyx.
In the name of the LyX developer community, thanks!
I tried Lyx very seriously and intensively for a few days some months ago. My computer was broken and I could not install Scientific Word on another computer.
A few days is not enough to discover all the wonderful things that LyX can do for you. You should try again with the1.5.0beta2. I'm sure you'd be surprised :-)
In theory Lyx should be every bit as good as Scientific Word. In practice, at least for me, despite Lyx's many very impressive capabilities, there is still a huge difference in favour of Scientific Word. But perhaps it is not so difficult for Lyx to catch up, and even overtake Sci. W.
Some people claims that we are already above by the simple fact that LyX is *portable*.
One of the really magnificent features of Scientific Word is "automatic substitution". This enables me to program any sequence of letters so that when I type that sequence, the program will automatically do something which otherwise might take a long sequence of complicated keystrokes with alt, ctrl, cursor keys, etc. etc.
I guess you don't know about LyX support for math macro. I've discovered that myself only very recently and I have to admit that it is quite useful. But this does not work with normal text.
I realize that Lyx also offers some very fancy and extensive options for (programmable) macros and hot keys, which at first sight would seem to be just as good as Sci.Word's automatic substitution. But, as far as I can remember, these Lyx macros (you call them "keybindings") are initiated by typing one or two key strokes which in general include a function key and/or a ctrl or alt key, (I can't remember now exactly what the possibilities were.)
Yes, but if you know LateX, you can also type the latex command directly: \alpha <space> will automatically insert the alpha symbol.
The beauty of the Sci Word automatic substitution is that I can keep my fingers on the keyboard and touch type whatever I want, just using regular letters. This is very convenient and very fast. Also it is easy to remember what my "words" for invoking each macro are. I can choose logical names. For example I have programmed things so that when I type gal, gbe, gde, gpsi, gbpsi, I get the Greek letters, \alpha, \beta, \delta, \psi \Psi respectively. I have not given the whole list here.
Well, you can define macros for that do if you want. But you will still need the slash prefix: \gal <space>, etc.
Then when I type gft I get \infty, or when I type gfr I get an array ready to receive the top and bottom parts of a fraction. Typing gil gives me an integral sign with boxes ready to receive the upper and lower limits.
You can use macro for that too if you want. But what is wrong with using the modifiers keys? For the fraction, you can achieve the same result with Alt-m-f or \frac <space>. You can add other binding with the modifier key.
Again these are only a small selection of the many very convenient automatic substitutions that I have programmed, and they really make my use of Scientific Word much faster and much more convenient than it would be without them.
I think it is just a matter of getting used to The LyX Way (tm). ...
If you can somehow get Lyx to work compatibly with Autohotkey this will be a tremendous step forward.
Is this program free? If yes I'll try to install it and see how it goes.
It might be still easier for you to include "automatic substitution" directly in Lyx, i.e. with the option of invoking macros by typing a sequence of regular letters, without alt, ctrl, etc.
As I said, you can already use math macro for that (although I don't understand what's so difficult about modifier keys).
Hopefully you will be able to avoid the limitations of Sci.Word's automatic substitution which I mentioned above.
No such limitation on LyX I think.
In Lyx, when the cursor is moved to be within a region of the text which is a mathematics formula, the exact extent of that rectangular region is indicated by four purple "corner markers". For various purposes it is highly desirable to to be able to see the exact location and extent of the "formula region" also when the cursor is outside that region. Thus I strongly suggest offering the option (I think it should even be the default) that the background colour of all the formula regions should always be different from the background colour of the rest of the screen, no matter where the cursor currently is. If this is difficult to implement then another perhaps less satisfactory solution would be to have those little corner markers remain visible at all times, perhaps changing to a different more intense colour when the cursor is inside the particular region that they enclose.
This last solution would not be hard to implement. The multiple backgrounds is more difficult.
As far as I can recall, one reason that I particularly wanted this feature was to enable me to see more clearly whether or not I had spaces between a formula and the text following or preceding it.
I don't think you can do mistake like this in LyX... Abdel.
