Comment by wenc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wenc | Hacker News Reader

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I think I tried LyX at least 5 times during grad school, but I couldn't quite get into it.

LyX's preview rendered simple math expressions alright, but it couldn't really render the custom math expressions (which required LaTeX math packages) that I needed for my dissertation. I eventually just settled on full LaTeX -- there's a slight learning curve, but ironically LaTeX felt easier to use and slightly more predictable than LyX because I didn't have to work around a bunch of limitations around displaying the final output (through ERTs).

Also, aesthetics mattered to me. The LyX rendering was an approximation of the final output (WYSIWYM), whereas the LaTeX generated PDF was actually the final output. The latter actually looked beautiful and I'd rather be able to see the actual final product than a WYSIWYM approximation of it (LyX does produce a PDF but it always felt like there was an additional abstraction layer separating the writing and the output, whereas LaTeX was more straightforward).

This mattered to me because I was writing long mathematical arguments with complicated expressions, which I had to inspect for correctness. I was also using TikZ a lot for diagrams and working with TikZ via ERTs wasn't ideal.

No knock on LyX -- it does serve a certain niche. But I also want to say to those who struggle with LyX, it may be worth the investment to write LaTeX directly.

Sounds like you would've benefited from a couple of useful LyX features:

* A critical and unfortunately very well hidden feature of LyX is "instant preview" (disabled by default, you have to enable it in preferences). This runs each individual equation through LaTeX so the equations you see are not some rough approximation of the PDF but very literally what you'll see. You can also manually make preview environments to wrap around ERTs like your TikZ diagrams. In both cases, when you actually edit the equation or ERT you'll still get the classic editor. Apart from that, it makes it feel like you're really editing the PDF directly.

* Another useful well-hidden feature is math macros. These are a lot like LaTeX's \newcommand, except that in LyX a math macro has three parts: the command name (plus any arguments), what literal LaTeX should be output, and a visual approximation to show up in equations that you're editing. That means that if there's some command in a package that LyX doesn't recognise (e.g. \foo) then you can make your own name for it (e.g. \myfoo), map its real LaTeX to \foo and its LyX display to whatever LyX-recognised features look vaguely like the real thing and then use that macro in your equations. Admittedly, this does require more upfront effort than using the LaTeX package directly but I think the payoff can be worth it.

I no longer write LaTeX but I appreciate this. Hopefully it helps LyX users.

I eventually discovered, after some introspection, that I preferred finer-grained control vs a WYSIWYM interface, because I enjoy working with code and don't mind markup all that much. It's a preference that I'd arrived at for myself but certainly appreciate that there are diverse positions on this.

The LyX editor for math is ridiculously competent. Even using plain LaTeX, LyX can be used just for the maths because it is so quick. I can't imagine the math for which LyX would be insufficient.

It doesn't render like tex in the editor, but it is logically correct.

LyX has a "tag" for plain tex, which allows you to insert any tex file into your document. That is a practical way of working with TikZ, for example.

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