viewer feature suggestion: secondary view windows about texpresso HOT 4 OPEN

It seems that this features and some other we have discussed will require an overhaul of the UI... Or rather, a proper UI rather than the current hack ;). I would like to get there eventually, but is will take time.

My plan is to write a new feature-equivalent UI in a modular way (I took some note on how I would like this), and once this is stable, experiment improvements (adding an help screen, moving some keyboard shortcuts to buttons for better discoverability, etc).

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I wonder if it is possible to isolate the "viewer" part of texpresso and implement it into some easier-to-use language that has a decent SDL API and is more likely to attract external contributions, for example OCaml^WPython. There is no shortage of UI features that would be reasonable, probably more than you want to work on yourself. Or maybe it is possible in the medium term to tweak an existing UI, just like you have done for the rendering part.

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I've also wondered if it would be possible to let extensions take care of doing the viewing, maybe by letting texpresso output bitmaps of the current page, or (partial) updates to previously communicated bitmaps. I don't know if there is a risk that such message passing would be a big performance hit.

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The viewer is in a sense already partially isolated in the form of the "engine" abstraction in the code, though it still uses a lot of side-channels for communication. I plan to make it more reusable so that one could plug a custom UI, but I don't have time for that right now.

A client enabling "remote use" by sharing bitmaps sounds like a good way to validate the design. To avoid a performance hit, the traditional way to achieve this locally has been to setup shared memory between the consumer and the producer (see, for instance, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT-SHM). If possible for your use case, that would be nice. If not, there is enough memory bandwidth on a modern computer for a simple protocol to be performant enough.

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