Why hasn't TeXmacs completely replaced TeX/LaTeX by now? - amichail
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cperciva
Why haven't apples completely replaced oranges by now?

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amichail
Please elaborate. TeXmacs is good enough for writing scientific papers and
books. So why are people still using TeX/LaTeX?

Most people now use WYSIWYG word processors for business. So why won't
scientists & mathematicians use WYSIWYG scientific word processors such as
TeXmacs?

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cperciva
LaTeX is good enough for writing scientific papers and books. So why should
people switch to TeXmacs?

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amichail
Try TeXmacs and it will be obvious why.

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kg2
I did, and I'm impressed. All I have to do is switch to a new editor for
document editing, learn new keybindings and mouse actions, port all my editor
customizations to Scheme, convert my .tex files to .tm files (a lossy process,
both empirically and by texmacs' own FAQ), give up on being able to answer my
questions with google or Leslie's or Don's excellent books, and give up on
being able to edit my documents over ssh. The WYSIWYG productivity gain is
sure to be huge, and more than make up for it. I'm waiting (tries it...) 0.422
seconds for tetex to run, every time I want to see what my document looks
like, which is really slowing down my work. Sold!

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DaniFong
I was using LyX for homework. To be honest I didn't even know about TeXmacs.
So maybe the problem is marketing? _laughs_

Is there a decent LyX TeXmacs comparison? My Google-fu is failing me.

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amichail
TeXmacs has its own real-time typesetter. So what you see while editing is
exactly what gets printed.

LyX just has a rough approximation for editing to make it less painful and
uses LaTeX/TeX to generate the output.

For scientific publications, you may be required to use TeX, so LyX might be
preferable there.

For homework, there's no reason why you can't use TeXmacs.

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DaniFong
Wow. That sounds much better.

I wonder about the underlying technology. I've been longing for an editor that
could handle special characters so things looked more like math.

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amichail
TeXmacs is an incredible achievement. It's probably one of the most
sophisticated open source programs ever written. Its main author is a genius.

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DaniFong
...sudo apt-get...

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DaniFong
Wow. It's really nice. I've noticed that they've decided to make their own
decisions as to the menu structure, so there is a bit of a learning curve. But
it's so beautiful!

I've formatted the YC application we have, and put it in here. It looks really
professional. That's quite an achievement, given the conversational language
we used. ^^

I then sent the whole thing around as a .tm file, so now the rest of the team
has no choice. Viral technology yay!

