Joachim Breitner

sm – same fate as LaTeX?

Published 2007-07-18 in sections English, Digital World.

Today I found an e-mail with the subject “re new sm thing” in my inbox. I almost deleted it, as I thought it to be spam with explicit content of some kind. On second thought, I did write a program called “sm” recently, so I read the message − and indeed, no spam, just comments to the program. A bit like LaTeX where, when you google for it (especially on google images), you do not get results related to the excellent type setting program...

In other news, screen-message has been featured on debaday today. I also got a bunch of nice feature ideas, but I’m reluctant to implement them: I want sm to be a very simple tool, with no thinking or docs reading needed. I’m afraid that if I implement all the nice ideas that others and I have, sm would become a big, complicated beast − but I’m keen to hear your opinions on that.

Comments

I don't know what the various feature suggestions are, but if they can be implemented as a superset of the existing program (so that its current behaviour continues), then that should be okay. People could choose to read more, but wouldn't have to if they didn't want to.
#1 Andrew am 2007-07-18
They could all be implemented as key shortcuts or configuration file entries, I guess. But somehow I like the charm of a program that has no configuration and does not distract you with all the nifty things it can do. But I haven’t made up my mind.
#2 Joachim Breitner (Homepage) am 2007-07-18

Have something to say? You can post a comment by sending an e-Mail to me at <mail@joachim-breitner.de>, and I will include it here.