Christopher James Huff wrote:
> There are already very good POV editors under Linux. I personally use 
> jEdit, which is an extremely customizeable programmer's editor that 
> comes with a POV-Ray editing mode, and there's an editing mode for 
> Emacs, which is the definition of customizeable. You can run the 
> existing Unix version of POV directly from within both of these.
> 
The thing is that a general editor like jEdit, emacs,... ( even
though they may be extremely customizeable), can not meet all the
specific needs a POV-RAY user can have.

Most of the time, these editors are meant for programming or script
languages (C, java, python,..). Even if POV uses a script language, it
is a raytracer not a language : It produces images, not software.

I do not know the answers to the following questions, but does Jedit or
Emacs has these features :
- handle multiple files at once : Has the user to select one files among
others with a mouse-click ?

- Is it possible to choose a predefined resolution without typing +W...
+H... in a command line ?

- Is it possible to choose the quality settings ( from +Q0 to Q9) with a
mouse click ?

- Does your editor show you the previously opened POV-Ray files (so that
you can open them with a mere click) ?

- Do you have the possiblity to define which area to render (+sc...
+ec.... ) without the command line

- Does it handle syntax hightlighting well ( I know that Pyvon does not
do it well either because of speed)

- Can you pause, then resume a render ?

- Can you choose the color for each type of keywords in a simple window
dialog ?

- Can you do queue rendering ( render one file then another unattended) ?


These are all the features can I can think of for the moment. There
might be others.

As I am not sure that you can answer yes to all the questions above,
that is why I think POV would 'deserve' a GUI on its own.

> 
> 
>>I do know that writing an interface is easier said than done, but with 
>>Kylix 3 it **might** be faster to write a proper Linux Interface to Linux.
>>Windows has one, Mac has one as well, why not Linux ?
> 
> 
> I like this idea better: create a Cocoa interface, and port it to 
> GNUStep for other systems.
> 
Could you tell more about Cocoa ?
I don't know much about it, but I thought it was a graphical toolkit for 
Mac OS.X.
Besides, is it easily portable to other platform ?
Is it freely available ?


Fabien

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