TeXmacs has been an excellent tool that has allowed me to quickly write numerous beautiful documents in the style of TeX during my PhD without all the struggle of TeX itself. I'd highly recommend anyone who regularly writes/types technical documents to give this a go.
There is a small learning curve, but with the Jolly Writer now being freely available, I think the learning curve is significantly diminished.
On top of this, there is a bustling community of users on http://forum.texmacs.cn who support one another when problems arise.
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).
Yes, of course it is not perfect and has limitations, but as you say, for the majority of purposes, I find it is a much easier tool to use.
I've mostly used TeXmacs to quickly draft documents without having to deal with setting up a TeX environment. Once I am happy with my drafts, I write these up in LaTeX.
Hopefully, in time TeXmacs will be more universally accepted that a post-writeup in LaTeX will not be necessary.
All this time I assumed that GNU TeXmacs was was a GNU Emacs mode for editing TeX. Turns out it isn’t related to either Emacs or TeX. If only they hadn’t chosen such a doubly misleading name I might have been using this for the past 20 years.
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.
As an aside, a fork of TeXmacs has recently gained a lot of ground, called Mogan (https://mogan.app) which is being developed alongside TeXmacs. Very usefully, they provide a means to test out TeXmacs/Mogan via your browser directly: https://mogan.app/wasm/Mogan.html
I would enourage anyone interested to give this a go.
It's such a quirky and messy ecosystem. So organically grown over decades. Doing any complex layout is a struggle of trial and error and searching for advise, there's so many ways to do the same thing, you end up combining two dozens sometimes subtly incompatible packages, you end up gardening your own templates over time with meticulously embedded commentary to keep the complexity at bay, you struggle to understand what's going on under the hood to reason about what's happening, you dive into source files, etc.
But the thing is ... at the end of all that labor, it all works and the quality of the output is simply second to none. Making a beautiful doc with it makes you feel like a master carving a famous statue out of marble. Ultimately it feels like it couldn't have been done any other way, and you do love the end result dearly.
I do keep half an eye on https://sile-typesetter.org/ to see if it may become sort of a consolidated "LaTeX: The Good Parts" over time, replacing the cruft with a new baseline, but in the meantime I will keep treasuring my little zoo of .tex files.
So I did already know that TeXmacs is not a LaTeX frontend (LaTeX being a set of TeX macros concerned with content organization, e.g. it's what gives you complex notions of things like "chapter" and "section" that you don't get from tex-core or tex-plain), but rather a WYSIWYG/M editor similar to LyX (LyX uses LaTeX under the hood).
But I thought it does use the TeX engine under the hood for typesetting? I figured it's a WYSIWYG frontend that maps some sort of internal representation to a TeX output and throws it at TeX in the end, with its own LaTeX-type ideas for higher organization?
Thanks! In my brain it was always "TeXmacs is for TeX what LyX is for LaTeX".
That actually makes me much more interested in TeXmacs, since an independent implementation puts it at the same level as something like SILE (with a very different user interface story, of course). Now I'm quite curious to check it out to see what kind of quality I could get out of it.
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).
This is great news. TeXmacs looks like a great project. Even though I don’t use it, I really appreciate there being options in the typesetting space, and dearly wish there were more. I wish they’d change the name, though — I ignored the project for a long long long time because of my reasonable presuppositions about it.
It does indeed, there are many options to choose from when you start up TeXmacs.
From what I can tell, it seems to be a variation of `tmmanual` which can be found under: Focus>Styles>Documentation>TeXmacs>tmmanual.
Can TeXmacs be used as a generic Word clone with beautiful typesetting, or is it more suited for scientific papers and requires a lot of tweaking for plain documents?
I write a couple of documents a year, and I'd really like them to be typeset beautifully than using Google Docs or Libreoffice Writer, which feel quite unsophisticated and bland.
I typeset my resume in LaTeX and I wonder if I should port that to TeXmacs as well.
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
I do think that TeXmacs can be used as a generic Word clone with beautiful typesetting, maybe "out-of-the-box", maybe with a little bit of tweaking. If you need tweaking, the forum at http://forum.texmacs.cn/ may be helpful.
For the resume, you may want to check out some cv templates in https://github.com/texmacs/tm-forge under the `examples` directory.
Edit: Ah, they only provide MacOS installers on the download page. But they also provide a PPA for Ubuntu and Debian. Weird only ArchLinux and Gentoo provide official packages.
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.
OpenBSD 7.2 has version 2.1.1 available as a package. Slackware has a SlackBuild script for 2.1.2 (slackbuilds.org). The epel 8 repository for RHEL and clones has version 2.1.1.
I think that TeXmacs is pretty available generally.
While the process of using TeX/LaTeX can be complex and require trial and error, combining multiple packages and customizing templates, the end result is high quality documents that feel like they could not have been produced any other way, and ultimately bring a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment to the user.
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.pdfhttps://arxiv.org/pdf/2112.05562.pdfhttps://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 not clear what this comment would like to add.
Maybe yet another one that misunderstood due to name that TeXmacs is about TeX, and then proceed to praise TeX. Then must rejoice because TeXmacs can produce equally high quality documents without the complexity, trial and error, package combination, etc.
Maybe it's time to change "TeXmacs" (which has little to do with, apart from taking an inspiration from, TeX or emacs), to... you guessed it!.. "TheJollyWriter".
There is a small learning curve, but with the Jolly Writer now being freely available, I think the learning curve is significantly diminished.
On top of this, there is a bustling community of users on http://forum.texmacs.cn who support one another when problems arise.