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).
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.