desktop application

[RobertZaks]

Are there plans to implement sTeX Viewer as a separate PC application? For a number of reasons, using VS Code and JavaScript is kind of repulsive to me, so I'm wondering if something like this will be available?

[Jazzpirate]

Ultimately, VS Code is just an LSP client communicating with an MMT instance, so technically, everything the IDE can do, MMT can on its own, too - the workflow might be a lot more cumbersome though if not automated, since it involves:

• writing the stex sources
• have them be in a valid math archive with relevant metadata
• have a running MMT instance aware of the math archive
• build the file (and its dependencies) to OMDoc and HTML
• running a server in MMT
• computing the URL based on the document URI and open the corresponding MMT server endpoint in some browser

A separate desktop application that automates / checks these things for convenience is not planned - it is relatively easy to build one though disregarding the frontend stuff (which is what the VSCode API does for us), and I'd be happy to help and give advice, if someone else wants to.

Also, since all the heavy duty functionality is in the LSP server (i.e. MMT), it's relatively easy to build a client for any alternative editor/IDE that can deal with LSP - for example, two students of ours recently starting writing a plugin for emacs.

[kohlhase]

I am not sure that Robert wants a sTeX editor/IDE. Just an sTeX viewer (a previewer of existing sTeX). I think that should be relatively easy. Just make a brwoser-based app that

• calls MMT or the build system to convert to "full html" (just as vscode does).
• serve that to the user.
  I think that should be enough

[Jazzpirate]

Everything I said applies exactly to such a viewer :)