mgubi

Vue is an experimental port of TeXmacs 1.2.5 to Webassembly with a new (immediate mode) GUI (Vue), a new icon set, support for Opentype Math fonts, powered by S7 Scheme (instead of Guile). Fully functional. More info at https://github.com/mgubi/texmacs/tree/wip_wasm_vue

I’m using it since 2006 and it is both quite stable and speedier than any alternative.

The website is also written with TeXmacs

this is plainly inaccurate. most people only use very few packages, which exists only for legacy reasons, they should be really integrated. TeXmacs provide all things 90% of people need.

ChatGPT can write TeXmacs documents :)

It is used regularly to write academic papers (examples here <https://www.texmacs.org/joris/main/publs.html>) and thesis, examples here: <https://github.com/texmacs/tm-forge/tree/main/examples/these...> and here <https://texmacs.github.io/notes/docs/example-documents.html>. It is used to write lecture notes and to deliver lectures online (e.g. here https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjXdYclFpynDi7EYP95Ep...). It can be used to produce full static website (e.g. here <https://mgubi.github.io/docs/main.html>, here <https://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/welcome.en.html> and here <https://texmacs.github.io/notes/docs/main.html>). There are not many users, but it is a working software with regular updates, since ~2000. Who compare it to LaTeX or Typst miss the point that it is a software designed to render writing a lot of mathematics easier and more importantly to not loose focus in irrelevant details. It has a visual macro system (see e.g. <https://x.com/gnu_texmacs/status/1251554336842407938>), something I haven't seen elsewhere, in production software. It is a structure editor, and an exploration of the design space in scientific editors. A field which lacks innovation and creativity.

Have you considered TeXmacs (www.texmacs.org)? See here a short video describing its features: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H46ON2FB30U and the twitter feed for more examples: https://twitter.com/gnu_texmacs

"here are WYSIWYG editors for TeX as well." not there are not. Apart from TeXmacs I know of no editor which give you on the screen the same result you get on the paper. LyX has not such a feature. If an approximation is ok, then fine, but I do not think you can call it WYSIWYG. Is something else. And it requires a lot of work to do it correctly. You should at least appreciate the technical merits, even if you prefer to use LaTeX for its ecosystem. But as a user of both I see the clear merits of TeXmacs in terms of quality of my work (mathematician), I can focus more on what I'm doing, instead on deciphering the mess of the LaTeX formulas and try to find where to put a correction. I can give online lectures with it, discuss on zoom while scribbling on a TeXmacs document, much of the work I was doing on paper I do now directly on the computer. To me there is a clear difference in the user experience between TeXmacs and LaTeX and I will never go back to write LaTeX if I can help it (I do it sometimes, if my coauthors are using it and do not want to try otherwise).

you can check also the manual which comes with the program, in the menu Help->Manuals.

In my mathematics is \d x .

TeXmacs has its own macro language. The equivalent of \newcommand is \assign together with \macro (yes, TeXmacs has proper first class macros, like any respectable language, e.g. Lisp). And macros arguments can be edited visually, here's an example: https://twitter.com/gnu_texmacs/status/1251554336842407938

looking at some other comments in this thread and also to my experience, it not unnecessary clarification in the large. I'm glad you just were doing some humor. :)

The phrase "it uses LaTeX" means that it runs the program LaTeX or that it need the "LaTeX format". Neither is true. Similarly you would say that "PanDoc uses Word?" or that a program that export to Word use Word. To me if you want to say that a program exports to a particular format just say so. If you want to say that a program needs a working installation of another program Y to work then you can say "it uses Y". So I think it is not correct to say that TeXmacs uses LaTeX. It can import/export it, like it can export/import PDF, HTML and other formats. TeXmacs does not need a working LateX installation to work. It comes with all its batteries included and on the Mac the app weight < 150 MB. That's all you need (including the LaTeX importer/exporter which is written in Scheme).

You can give a look at TeXmacs' twitter account for example of what it can do: https://twitter.com/gnu_texmacs

Not to mention JavaScript, then :)

I would really like to have names of packages you use regularly and you think you will miss in any other system. I can think only of TikZ, and again, for targeted purposes like DSL you can always ask TeXmacs to run LaTeX and get the output. See e.g. https://twitter.com/gnu_texmacs/status/1605167149173153793

You can just pick the AppImage if you like Linux. No installation needed. If you are on Mac, then you just need to give permission to run the software, it is not a specific problem of TeXmacs, it happens because TeXmacs executable are not signed. There are many reason you can turn down a software. any software. The point is: to whom are you making a favour? :) TeXmacs is free and make you save a lot of time. So I would say it is worth to spend a bit of it learning to use it properly. To be effective it require you to unlearn some LaTeX habits. But again, it is up to you. What I think is unfair is to deduce from these features that it is not a useful piece of software.

it is not: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H46ON2FB30U

This is not our experience as TeXmacs users. 90% of the time you are always using the same features, which are well implemented in TeXmacs. Maybe you can show me some of your documents which require TeX, so that I can understand the uses cases you think about. If you look at documents on arXiv there is no reason not to use it. Of course TeXmacs will never take over but it allows us to focus on the content and not on writing TeX. Time gained for more productive tasks with no backside. I guess people praising LaTeX should give explicit examples of what they mean by "huge package ecosystem", in the sense of a measure of how many of those packages are really used by 80% of the scientific community. And btw, TeXmacs can just run TikZ fine, if you really need it. https://twitter.com/gnu_texmacs/status/1509200571537973255

I'm not sure what are you referring to. TeXmacs is used everyday by many people, at lest 3/4 of my students wrote their PhD thesis with it, some of them enterely, other the initial draft. All my papers are written with it, lecture notes, presentations, letters. My experience is the same of many other people. Even comparning TeXmacs with AucTeX+Emacs is misleading. Totally different user experience. TeXmacs does not have yet a fully stable collaborative functionality, but the functionality is there and it experimentally work. Maybe one day will be completed and you will not need to rely on a central server to use it, just fire up a TeXmacs instance to be the server and connect the others: https://mobile.twitter.com/gnu_texmacs/status/13910657725338... So, slowly, but we will be there too. :)

TeX is a typesetting language. Like Postscript. There is no particular reasons humans need to write it. That is the reason LaTeX was invented (and Context). We need formats, like PDF or HTML, to exchange and reliably use informations and describe documents. TeXmacs is a document preparation system from the UI to all the other things needed, in one place, in a uniform architecture. It has its own internal format and it exports to TeX/LaTeX as it can export to HTML or PDF. Publishers do not need TeX to store documents, indeed TeX is no a particularly good way to store data. It is what it is: a typesetting language, not a document description format. So I do not see any conflicts between using TeXmacs and then sending a TeX file to the editor. Anyway in most of the cases them (or nowadays most likely you) need to reformat it to the standards of the particular journal. I (and many others, including the main author of TeXmacs) work in academia and I have no problem using TeXmacs everyday to do my work and then send to the publisher a nice LaTeX file, which I do not have to edit by hand. I'm (mostly) TeX/LaTeX free since 2006 and very happy about this.

It is not clear what this comment would like to add. The presupposition that no other software can equal or surpass some magic powers of TeX/LaTeX has nothing to do with technical merit. Indeed I guess most users cannot distinguish a document produced with TeXmacs or with LaTeX. For example all these papers: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.05584.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2112.05562.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2210.15047.pdf have been typesetted directly with TeXmacs with no intervention of LaTeX whatsoever. What use cases do you have in mind to support your claim?

ps: it is clear that TeX is a complete typesetting language, but not a format. So TeXmacs need to be compared with some restricted set of LaTeX packages. The goals for the program is to deliver the user from the burden to be an expert to be able to compose beautiful and rich technical documents. But I would disagree that the ultimate goal of a system like TeX/LaTeX is to satisfy the 0.01% of hackers which enjoy spending their times coding in an obscure macro language (which is fun, I know, like composing documents directly writing PostScript programs). TeX was made to make possible beautiful typesetting and TeXmacs carry on this vision and philosophy, so in this sense the name is fitting.

It is cross-platform, distributed for Windows, Linux and MacOS X. There is a port for Haiku (not maintained, but working). And you can find also AppImages from one of the developers, but not on the official page. Also you can try Mogan which is a distribution which try to be easier to install on a wide range of machines.

I'm not sure which kind of limitations you are referring to. In my experience the only kind of things I cannot replicate with TeXmacs are variable width paragraphs to follows an arbitrary shape around an image. TeXmacs can do multi-column paragraphs, and complex layouts like this one: https://github.com/texmacs/tm-forge/tree/main/examples/resum... or this one https://github.com/texmacs/tm-forge/blob/main/examples/exerc... or rich presentations like this one https://github.com/texmacs/tm-forge/blob/main/examples/lectu... One should bear in mind that TeX by itself is a Turing-complete typesetting language while TeXmacs format is a format that is it restrict the range of documents one can express in order to be able to transform them more reliably, e.g. by conversion to HTML or PDF or even LaTeX. So certainly there are many more things you can to with TeX (but not with LaTeX itself) than with TeXmacs but this is a feature, not a bug :) (very much like the fact that you can do many more things with PS than with PDF, and that is why the first is a language while the second is a format).

I use it for anything going from lecture notes, personal notes and plans, letters with university heading, presentations, cv. Some CV examples can be found here: https://github.com/texmacs/tm-forge/tree/main/examples for example this: https://github.com/texmacs/tm-forge/tree/main/examples/kjh-v... some of them can be directly exported to HTML. For myself I use a simpler style and tweaked a bit the bibliography styles to get a list of my publications. I see no reason to use LaTeX to typeset anything which does not require to be sent to a publisher and even in that case I prefer to use TeXmacs for most of the life-cycle of the document and export to LaTeX as I export to PDF or HTML, i.e. for rendering purposes, or transmission. But I guess it depends very much on which kind of document are you thinking to. TeXmacs can be used (more or less out of the box) to create websites. The main TeXmacs page at www.texmacs.org is made with TeXmacs and also the blog at https://texmacs.github.io/notes/docs/overview.html

TeXmacs is more mature than SILE, or any other recent attempt to alternative typesetting engine. It exists since the '90 while SILE seems to be around since 2015. And TeXmacs is a complex and complete piece of software which includes a document format, a typesetting engine, conversion engines from and to various formats, user interface, a graphics editor (https://twitter.com/gnu_texmacs/status/1607316217206898688), a plugin system to interface with other softwares. All this is written in a mix of C++ and Scheme, extensible in Scheme and the typesetting engine comes with a proper macro language with first class macros (i.e. macros can be arguments to other macros). Moreover TeXmacs has other subsystem like a parser for mathematical formulas which can assign semantic meaning to user input (e.g. the "-" in "-1" is different from the minus in "1 - 2") and a subsystem which generates mathematical glyphs to complete usual fonts for their use in mathematical typesetting (https://twitter.com/gnu_texmacs/status/1606953318118756354).

It has been an unfortunate decision. Once in a while the community discuss to change the name, but no convincing proposal have emerged. On the other hand I really hear very few people complaining about JavaScript. So I guess, the name is not all here.

webasm do not have access to the OS, one need to specialise TeXmacs to work better in the browser. For the moment this is just an early experiment which shows some hope.

I collected here: https://texmacs.github.io/notes/docs/art-of-math-writing.htm... some of my reflections about mathematical writing and in particular about the reasons I choose TeXmacs as my tool of choice. It might be also relevant to you.

LyX is good but the quality of the typesetter is not. Early on, when looking for a replacement for my TeX workflow I was taken back by the rendering. It improved lately, but still TeXmacs is a superior tecnology which renders onscreen exactly as on paper, and it is fully scriptable in scheme, including the user interface. I use it to lecture online, via Zoom, for example and I would not be able to do the same with LyX. See e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL50D2PpswE Also thinking about mathematics in TeXmacs is really pleasant. I wrote here my reflection on mathematical writing in TeXmacs: https://texmacs.github.io/notes/docs/art-of-math-writing.htm...