
LyX: combine the power of LaTeX with the ease of use of a graphical interface - delib
https://www.lyx.org
======
adrianmsmith
The thing I love most about LyX is the "outline" view. Editing plain text e.g.
in "vi" has nothing comparable, but neither does Word, or Google Docs, etc.,
in my opinion.

In the screenshot here [https://pauljmiller.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/lyx-
main-scr...](https://pauljmiller.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/lyx-main-
screen.png) you can see there is a pane on the left with the document
structure. At the bottom of that pane, there are four buttons, the right of
which are an up and down button. Those four buttons (left, right, up, down)
allow you to take a section of the document and move it around. The up/down
change its position relative to other sections, and left/right promote/indent
the section (e.g. change heading to sub-heading, or vice versa).

When editing large documents (e.g. > 100 pages), I find this invaluable if I
wish to restructure the document.

~~~
MagnumOpus
> neither does Word

MS Word has an interactive draggable outline view with the promote/demote/drag
features ("View"|"Outline"), it also has a navbar outline view
("View"|"Navigation Pane" checkbox). You can use both combined.

~~~
adrianmsmith
The "move heading up/down" don't work as well as LyX.

On Word, if you move a heading up/down with the buttons (in "View"|"Outline")
the heading moves but the text and sub-sections underneath it don't move.

Before:

    
    
        MY HEADING
        Some text
           SUB-HEADING
           Text about the sub-heading
           SUB-HEADING 2
           More text
    

If you take "SUB-HEADING 2" and click "move up", the document is now:

    
    
        MY HEADING
        Some text
           SUB-HEADING
           SUB-HEADING 2
           Text about the sub-heading
           More text
    

What you want, when you move a heading, is not only to move the heading, but
to really move the whole section, including: the heading, its text, and sub-
headings, the text under the sub-headings, etc.

LyX moves the sections around, Word only moves the headings.

I'll concede that dragging in Word does give the desired effect (I admit I
never tried drag before you mentioned it, despite having used Word for 25
years and always wishing for that feature. I assumed dragging did the same as
the buttons.) And the indent/outdent buttons do work take their contents with
them as well.

~~~
orev
What is your text is not related to the heading? In Word just select
everything you want to move, then move it all together.

Also Ctrl-Alt-arrow moves the sections around.

~~~
derefr
Why would your text be unrelated to the header?

In an editor with first-class outlining support, the document is usually
_composed_ with the outline view in play, so essentially you’re always adding
text and headers to a “node” rather than to the document as a whole. You then
place the node in the outline, rather than placing text in a linear document
that happens to (sometimes) reflect a valid outline.

It’s less comparable to Word, and more comparable to editing .rtf files and
placing them into a flow in Desktop Publishing software. The content (the .rtf
file) and the document (the flow-boxes) are separate, and can be modified
separately without knowledge of how the other side has been modified.

(This workflow also being the original TeX workflow, just replacing “.rtf
files” with individual .tex content files, and “the layout” with a structural
.tex file that imports those content files.)

~~~
orev
Because a writing app supports the _act of_ writing. Once you’re done writing,
you don’t need the app anymore. And when you’re in the act of writing, things
are often not linear. You might come up with headers first, and fragments of
text, usually in the order they pop into your head, not the order they need to
be in the final copy. Then you wordsmith and reorder things to get them into a
progression.

And in Word you can always collapse the section and then move it around with
all of the text.

------
ISL
I've used LyX for ~17 years. Did all of my homework in it in college, wrote my
thesis in it, and pull it out anytime I need to write a TeX document for
myself.

If you're new to LaTeX, just grab LyX and go. It is a great gateway to LaTeX,
and a reliable friend even if you wind up working in pure LaTeX, in order to
collaborate or satisfy a formatting requirement, some of the time.

Thank you, LyX!

~~~
Quanttek
One problem for me: the text always fills the full width of the window even
though that quickly becomes ineligible. I haven't found a way yet to fix that

~~~
illirik
Make the window smaller. Seriously, I had the same problem and now I have room
on my screen.

------
wenc
I've used LyX and had high hopes for it, but never really fit my workflow.

LyX is really good if you need to produce simple documents and don't need to
invoke a lot of special LaTeX packages. I think LyX hits a sweet spot between
Microsoft Word and full-blown LaTeX.

If you need to do anything out of the ordinary (like use TikZ), LyX will still
let you do it but it's going to feel a bit unwieldy. LyX is also quite slow on
very large documents like dissertations. I recall the WYSIWYM rendering of
math symbols and the old-school fonts looking a little unpolished compared to
the PDFs generated by LaTeX, which bothered me a little. Many advanced LaTeX
heads are sticklers for correct aesthetics. I know LyX can generate PDFs too,
but if I wanted that, I'd rather write LaTeX code directly (more control, much
more lightweight and responsive).

I eventually wrote my dissertation on TeXworks.

p.s. as mentioned in another comment, TeXmacs has a higher fidelity WYSIWYG
than LyX.

~~~
bovine3dom
> LyX is also quite slow on very large documents like dissertations.

Have you tried it again in the last year or two? I've found that scrolling,
for example, has become a lot faster since I first started using it.

~~~
adrianmsmith
Right, I wrote a 100 page document in LyX on a 2011 Mac Mini and it was fine.
(Not sure what version of LyX.)

------
snicker7
I think that GNU TexMacs [1] is a superior to LyX, albeit less well known.
Unlike LyX, it doesn't depend on the TeX stack and all the baggage that comes
with it.

1:
[http://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/welcome.en.html](http://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/welcome.en.html)

~~~
jordigh
Isn't TeXmacs dead? It got removed from the Debian repos due to lack of
maintenance.

[https://packages.qa.debian.org/t/texmacs.html](https://packages.qa.debian.org/t/texmacs.html)

~~~
da_chicken
No, the package just has no Debian maintainer so it was dropped. Latest
release is 1.99.7 which was released July 5:

[https://github.com/texmacs/GNUTeXmacs/releases](https://github.com/texmacs/GNUTeXmacs/releases)

------
reikonomusha
I’ve found LyX good for getting a document started, allowing you to not think
so heavily about formatting details while giving you decent output.

Eventually, though, I export to LaTeX and format the rest myself. I find that
using LyX long enough, you don’t have the formatting commands available to you
(and you end up with a ton of unreadable custom insets and inline TeX), and
configuration becomes as complex as LaTeX itself.

It’s a neat project and I’ve been happy to see it steadily grow over the past
10+ years.

~~~
greeneggs
> you don’t have the formatting commands available to you (and you end up with
> a ton of unreadable custom insets and inline TeX)

Does this mean a LyX user can't easily collaborate with others? Most people
don't use LyX. If in a collaboration one author uses LyX and everyone else
uses normal LaTeX (possibly with lots of packages, tikz/pstricks, etc.), will
this cause problems---either for the LyX user, for everyone else, or for
version control?

------
porker
LyX is a wonderful program that needs more love and more developers.

If you have the skills please help out.

C++ and Python:
[https://www.lyx.org/GetInvolved](https://www.lyx.org/GetInvolved)

~~~
nift
It's seems to be down for me. Perhaps the hacker news hug of death?

~~~
ethelward
Most probably; I happen to have gone to the site a few says ago and it was
working as usual.

------
amhouse
There's also WordTeX, a "WYSIPCTWOTCG" editor. There's a paper [1], but this
is a rare case where the Youtube video [2] is both more entertaining and the
medium lets the content shine.

[1]
[http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/twildenh/wordtex/](http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/twildenh/wordtex/)

[2]
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlX_pThh7z8](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlX_pThh7z8)

~~~
a-nikolaev
This is nice indeed.

------
porker
The feature in LyX I miss most when using other document editors is "Branches"
[0].

I like to write thoughts about what I'm writing, notes to myself etc and _keep
them within the document_ , knowing they won't be output in the final file.

Word's comments never work as well for this. For reviewing they're fine, for
longer prose... no.

0\.
[https://wiki.lyx.org/LyX/NewInLyX14#toc6](https://wiki.lyx.org/LyX/NewInLyX14#toc6)

~~~
adiM
ConTeXt provides similar feature called
[modes]([http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Modes](http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Modes))
and you can imitate it in LaTeX using the
[comment]([https://ctan.org/pkg/comment?lang=en](https://ctan.org/pkg/comment?lang=en))
package

------
ahartmetz
Trivia: LyX was initially developed by Matthias Ettrich who started KDE one
year later. LyX is 23 years old, barely younger than Qt, the GUI framework it
uses.

------
epx
Wrote my master dissertation in LyX, it was great. The LaTeX-specific features
that LyX did not support, I put in a "preamble". Never had a problem and it
even worked on a then-rare iBook (2004).

------
delib
I use LyX to write academic papers and really love it. Sure, there are quirks,
but it's still makes for a better workflow compared to the alternatives.

Especially important for me:

\- track changes, which makes collaboration convenient (especially with less
technically-oriented colleagues)

\- math typesetting with instant preview

\- integrated BibTex support, which makes citing easy

\- easy to reference equations, tables, and figures in the text

------
rkeene2
I use LyX a lot for writing manuals, especially operations manuals. It's
worked out fairly well. I've written and maintained several large "Operations
Manuals" with other members of my team by placing the LyX documents under
version control.

The main issue I had at one point was producing usable HTML output from the
LaTeX conversion process, but I found a tool that processes the LyX file
directly into HTML which produced acceptabled results.

------
hatmatrix
Interesting how ShareLaTeX, Overleaf, Authorea etc. did not adopt LyX even
though they are trying to reach a broader audience. Anyone know the reason?

~~~
beojan
They're all web-based and LyX isn't?

~~~
Y_Y
Qt has a web assembly target now though, so it could be.

------
michaelmior
I haven't used LyX in years, but I still probably would if I was doing the
same math-heavy work I used to. WYSWIG is really helpful when doing equation
editing and learning the shortcuts enabled me to mostly keep up with note
taking on my laptop during math lectures.

------
lewis500
Lyx is great. Although I’ve moved on to just typing straight latex, I probably
would never have gotten started if it weren’t for Lyx. I still use it to set
tables and such, because coding latex tables can be a huge pain. A great
project.

------
adrianmsmith
LyX is a wonderful program and I do love it, but one thing I will caution
against is tables. If you need to use tables, consider not using LyX. LyX
looks like it can do tables, the UI in LyX is great for editing tables,
however...

Tables do not split across pages (at least not by default). Word and Google
Docs etc. can do this out of the box. Maybe there is a way to get this to
work. For e.g. the description of a database table, as a table in the document
with columns like "column name", "type", "description", not being able to use
multiple pages is a real limitation.

~~~
lima
That's how LaTeX tables work.

You can enable the "multi table" option in the table properties, which will
use the longtable package to extend the table across multiple pages.

------
costrouc
I am a fan of LyX but using version control with the resulting tex document is
near impossible and does not work well with others editing in a regular text
editor. Wonder if anyone else had this experience?

~~~
adrianmsmith
I use LyX with version control.

We put the software architecture document (about 100 pages) in a single .lyx
file in a "doc" directory of our Git repository, which stores our software
source code.

We love feature branches, so we update not only the code, but the
documentation as well, in the branch. When we merge, everything gets merged
together.

What I mean to say is, we're not just using Git to "check out, check in", we
are also merging and branching as well.

The workflow works perfectly for us.

We've been using this for 2 years, with many many commits. Hardly any merge
errors. And no times where Git merged wrongly and corrupted the document or
similar. I fix merge errors in a text editor if they occur (maybe once every
few months, takes a few minutes to repair.)

One thing I would say is that LyX always writes the newline endings native to
your platform. Git, by default, checks out Windows newlines on Windows and
converts them to UNIX newlines on commit. So that works well too. But if you
don't use that feature of Git, you might experience problems.

We haven't had a need to edit the generated TeX document manually. We just use
LyX.

------
binarez
Can someone comment on LyX vs TeXstudio? I'm using TeXstudio, I'm loving it
but I'm wondering if I'm missing out on great stuff.

~~~
gh02t
Different levels of abstraction. TeXstudio is akin to an IDE for LaTeX,
whereas LyX is more a nice frontend on top of LaTeX. IMO, if you're already
experienced and happy with LaTeX there's no reason to switch, but if you don't
already know LaTeX or you find the workflow clunky LyX may be a good fit.

------
Y_Y
I've been using this for years and somehow continue to be able to amaze
academics when I show them they don't need to write LaTeX tables and equations
etc. by hand.

While there's an argument for writing plain text, I don't think it applies to
most of the academics who can barely run a python script and wish they had
secretaries typesetting their papers like the good old days.

------
timwaagh
I appreciate the efforts of LyX as it makes LaTeX writing more creative and
less technical. I did use it at some point. But being rather absolutist when
it comes to this, as a student i still preferred Word and Libreoffice because
i like to play with the placement of pictures to explain technical things. But
LyX might be your best bet if LaTeX is a requirement.

------
mlthoughts2018
“the ease of use of a graphical interface”

Why do people think this is a thing? Whether I’m making a poster or slides in
latex / beamer, dealing with spreadsheet data with pandas in an ipython
console, programmatically checking email, writing code in emacs no window
mode, or virtually anything else I do with a computer, perhaps the hugest rule
of thumb is to avoid GUIs at all costs, they are the biggest productivity
killer.

I know people will chime in with their opposing experiences, but it’s just
noise to me. Sure, there are limited good uses for GUIs, but I cannot fathom
at all how writing tex documents could be one. Doesn’t matter if you’re
totally new to it or been doing it for years, anything taking your hand away
from the keyboard to deal with menus is killing you.

If you want wysiwyg-like behavior, just open another shell tab with a
permanently running job that detects changes to your source file, re-runs
whatever document compilation command you use, and refreshes evince or some
other viewer that you never interact with except to look at. Spending time
learning this way of working from the start is worth far more than spending
relatively less time on the first few documents in lyx.

------
lima
Web archive mirror:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20180215013049/http://www.lyx.or...](https://web.archive.org/web/20180215013049/http://www.lyx.org:80/Home)

------
xvilka
Hopefully LaTeX3 [1] will be ready soon, migrating to it should make LyX
developes' life easier too.

[1] [https://github.com/latex3/latex3](https://github.com/latex3/latex3)

------
chajath
LyX has been my go-to editor for years now. I like it's wysiwym approach and I
get so productive on LyX that can amaze seasoned latex users.

~~~
hoppelhase
If you like WYSIWYM, you may also like typora.io for Markdown.

------
roesel
What I miss in LyX is the ability to interface with Grammarly or
LanguageTools. Otherwise it works great.

------
Driky
I think the server died under front page pressure :)

