This message is not at all apropos of getting 1.2 released, so read it when you're in a dreamy mood.
Something which I think would really be a *killer* feature for LyX would be the ability to write plug-ins to handle custom environments. As an example of the kind of thing I'm thinking of, categorists and topologists often want to draw commutative diagrams. I'm neither, but I have attended a category theory course, and I wrote up my notes in LyX. I had to do with huge amounts of ERT (there may even have been some posts from me here about it at that time). What would really rock would be if I had been able to knock together a quick plug-in so that I could visually edit the diagrams. The interface would be rather like a table, except that every cell would start in mathed mode, and there would be a gesture for adding arrows between cells, and labelling them. Of course, such a facility could, with some work, be hacked into the main source code. But then that's only good enough until I need some new feature (two-cells, for example). Personally, I'm somewhat on the path to becoming a LaTeX power-user, and I devise my own macros for complex notations. It would be so brilliant if, at the same time as I was devising the LaTeX macros, I could knock together a package for a WYSIWYM editor in LyX. I'm imagining an API accessible from python, although it doesn't have to be python. The reason I suggest python is that sketch (http://sketch.sf.net ), which is a freehand-style vector editor written in python, has an incredibly powerful plug-in architecture, and plug-ins really can create new types of object etc.. The API would let you define a new type of inset, and build it up out of existing insets. My commutative diagram thing would use the Tabular inset, I should think, but plonk a mathed inset inside each cell. The API would also give you access to some primitive line-drawing commands (so I could draw my arrows), and let you position the insets arbitrarily (so I could put some math insets half-way along the arrows). And, of course, the API would let you specify what LaTeX code to generate... (and, in principle, other backends, but the plug-ins I'm imagining would be LaTeX-only). Well, it's a nice thought, anyhow. Jules
