I remember using early versions of LyX back in college in 1995.

I feel that it led to the development of KDE. I remember Matthias Ettrich released LyX and it used the Qt toolkit.

The next year I remember Matthias announcing the "Kool Desktop Environment" and it also was based on Qt. I don't know if Matthias just really like Qt or if he was happy with the success of LyX and decided to make an entire desktop environment.

This is definitely the answer... people glossing over this should note that the What You Mean part is reflected in the GUI and makes production of quite sophisticated documents easy. As you expand your LaTeX knowledge you can move on to insert it directly into documents.

Highly recommended if you just want to get started.

This is really cool, and not something you'd be able to typically do in Vim or the like. But it also uses latex notation, which I can't stand for things like itemized lists, haha.