Dear Lyx people: I am a professor of mathematics who has been using Scientific Word intensively for many years.
I tell you this in order to reinforce my claim that my suggestions to you below could lead to very significant improvements in Lyx. I do hope that you will give them serious consideration. I would be happy to clarify and/or elaborate further on what I have written here. I will gladly telephone or skype you if you wish. 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. 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. 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. I know that Lyx is a real delight for some of my students who do not have experience with Scientific Word. But when my computer was repaired I gratefully returned to using Scientific Word. This is the message that I should have written to you then. Here are my suggestions. Please be patient and read what I have to say. I really think you will find that it is worth your trouble. 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 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.) 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. 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. 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 have praised Scientific Word, but I also had some serious complaints about some limitations of its automatic substitution, at least in the relatively old version that I use. A couple of years ago I found a lovely way to overcome those limitations, using the (freely available) program "AutoHotKey". When I started working with Lyx I assumed that here too AutoHotKey would be able to overcome my problems. Alas, for some strange reason, AutoHotKey does not work properly in combination with Lyx. Scientific Word limits the number of user definable automatic substitution words. I want lots more than they can give me. Also, some automatic substitutions, no matter how carefully I try to program them, have the annoying feature that after they execute, the cursor is not in the natural position for continuing to type. (E.g. after I apply my macro "gfr" the cursor moves to a place after the fraction, instead of locating in the field of the numerator or the denominator.) AutoHotKey is an extremely flexible and clever program (running under windows) which enables one to program automatic substitution on the computer globally. Typing just about any key sequence from within any program can cause the computer to do almost anything you want. It is also very easy to switch these options on and off, and to prepare separate files of macros for different purposes. These separate files can be easily switched on and off, separately. I.e., one can invoke any combination of them at any given time. So, for example, now when I switch on my macro file for Scientific Word and type zfr, Autohotkey runs gfr for me and then it moves the cursor to the place where I want it to be. I do not remember exactly what happened in my trials several months ago, when I tried to combine Autohotkey macros with Lyx. But in general the results were quite disastrous, and I think sometimes even inconsistent. (I.e. I have some recollection that the same Autohotkey macro sometimes produced different results with Lyx on different occasions.) Clearly there is some subtle reason which prevents these two programs from working properly together. And this is a GREAT SHAME. If you can somehow get Lyx to work compatibly with Autohotkey this will be a tremendous step forward. Alternatively, there are surely other programs which do similar things to what Autohotkey does, and if you can get Lyx to work with one of them, that would also be very good. Presumably there are equivalent programs to AutoHotKey which run under Linux and of course I hope that the Linux version of Lyx can coexist successfully with at least one of them. 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. Hopefully you will be able to avoid the limitations of Sci.Word's automatic substitution which I mentioned above. Of course the best of all possible worlds would be to enable both exterior automatic substitution via AutoHotKey or something analogous, AND programmable automatic substitution from within Lyx. I will conclude with one other rather different suggestion: 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. 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. There were possibly other reasons also, but I cannot remember now. I am sorry that I did not write to you then, but I was very pressed for time. Many thanks for your attention to this message. Best wishes, for your future success with Lyx, and in general! Yours sincerely, Michael Cwikel Professor of Mathematics, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel
