It's easy to miss the video on the front page, which I find provides a great visual summary of features and will make you understand why other commenters are praising how efficient (and pleasurable, I might add!) TeXmacs is: https://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/videos.en.html.
The best in-depth reference, even counting the astoundingly complete bundled manual, remains The Jolly Writer. It is a beautifully typeset book, available at https://www.scypress.com/book_download.html.
EDIT: missing link, typo
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dirk94018
TexMacs is great. However, I use LaTeX regularly. Used to keep a cheat sheet of commands I'd forget between documents. Today I can describe what I want in plain English, pipe it through toast, and get the LaTeX back.
LaTeX, vim, sed, awk, the whole Unix toolkit is getting a new lease on life, because their interfaces are text. Text in, text out. An LLM can write you a perfect \begin{tikzpicture} on the first try.
Clicking through a GUI is much harder and instead of the computer doing the work, I feel like I am working. WYSIWYG won because it made functionality discoverable, today we have AI mentors.
aatayev
I love this tool and even wrote my PhD thesis with it. I find that there is a somewhat large boiler plate component when writing with LaTeX, but with TeXmacs, writing maths just feels easy. It’s easy to set up, and easy to use.
Nowadays I find myself using the Mogan fork as I find it’s a little more stable.
But again, awesome project and would highly recommend people to use, not just as a math writing tool, but simply also as a word processor
gudzpoz
You can try TeXmacs in your browser at https://yufeng-shen.github.io/Mogan.html . (It's actually from a fork of TeXmacs called Mogan, of which I've been a happy user due to better CJK support.)
By the way, I do think TeXmacs is an Emacsen as it provides Guile/Scheme as an extension language, though I don't know how customizable it is. (I think the built-in REPLs for Python/Maxima/Scheme/... are written in Scheme.) And then, it does support quite some TeX commands (and you input them by pressing backslash followed by their command name), so I do think their "TeXmacs" name is very much justified.
wbolt
Are there any „real world users” of this? During all my years in academia I haven’t met any. Most just use plain LaTeX. Some do MS Word. Rarely something else. Never Texmacs. This is my experience at least.
With stuff like Overleaf and plugins for modern IDEs, honestly I can’t say LaTeX is a bad experience. It does what it should.
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qubex
I had no idea this existed and I’m in love. I’ve been using LATEX for more than twenty years and most of my use cases would’ve been covered by this. It’s going to be a fixture for the second half of my life and they can pry it out of my cold, dead hands.
kbr2000
Reminds me mostly of LyX [0], although that one does use LaTeX and Tex; and targets a WYSIWYM approach [1]
The name is TeXmacs - but "Notice that TeXmacs is not based on TeX/LaTeX." I wonder why they chose that name.
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egorelik
Early on in my computing life, I discovered TeXmacs as a user interface for a Computer Algebra System I had been playing with called Axiom. Ironically, this was before I had ever even heard of either TeX or Emacs! It seemed like a cool piece of software, but when I later learned LaTeX I discovered I prefer non-WYSIWYG for everything but lecture notes. Still, in the years since I've recognized that this setup, combining a math engine with a rich display interface, was an early version of what would later be popularized as Notebooks.
It's easy to miss the video on the front page, which I find provides a great visual summary of features and will make you understand why other commenters are praising how efficient (and pleasurable, I might add!) TeXmacs is: https://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/videos.en.html.
You can find some example documents here https://texmacs.github.io/notes/docs/example-documents.html.
Other posts on the TeXmacs notes site discuss programmability with Scheme, typesetting math (https://texmacs.github.io/notes/docs/texmacs-math-typesettin..., shows how good the HTML export is), and more.
The best in-depth reference, even counting the astoundingly complete bundled manual, remains The Jolly Writer. It is a beautifully typeset book, available at https://www.scypress.com/book_download.html.
EDIT: missing link, typo
TexMacs is great. However, I use LaTeX regularly. Used to keep a cheat sheet of commands I'd forget between documents. Today I can describe what I want in plain English, pipe it through toast, and get the LaTeX back.
LaTeX, vim, sed, awk, the whole Unix toolkit is getting a new lease on life, because their interfaces are text. Text in, text out. An LLM can write you a perfect \begin{tikzpicture} on the first try.
Clicking through a GUI is much harder and instead of the computer doing the work, I feel like I am working. WYSIWYG won because it made functionality discoverable, today we have AI mentors.
I love this tool and even wrote my PhD thesis with it. I find that there is a somewhat large boiler plate component when writing with LaTeX, but with TeXmacs, writing maths just feels easy. It’s easy to set up, and easy to use.
Nowadays I find myself using the Mogan fork as I find it’s a little more stable.
But again, awesome project and would highly recommend people to use, not just as a math writing tool, but simply also as a word processor
You can try TeXmacs in your browser at https://yufeng-shen.github.io/Mogan.html . (It's actually from a fork of TeXmacs called Mogan, of which I've been a happy user due to better CJK support.)
By the way, I do think TeXmacs is an Emacsen as it provides Guile/Scheme as an extension language, though I don't know how customizable it is. (I think the built-in REPLs for Python/Maxima/Scheme/... are written in Scheme.) And then, it does support quite some TeX commands (and you input them by pressing backslash followed by their command name), so I do think their "TeXmacs" name is very much justified.
Are there any „real world users” of this? During all my years in academia I haven’t met any. Most just use plain LaTeX. Some do MS Word. Rarely something else. Never Texmacs. This is my experience at least.
With stuff like Overleaf and plugins for modern IDEs, honestly I can’t say LaTeX is a bad experience. It does what it should.
I had no idea this existed and I’m in love. I’ve been using LATEX for more than twenty years and most of my use cases would’ve been covered by this. It’s going to be a fixture for the second half of my life and they can pry it out of my cold, dead hands.
Reminds me mostly of LyX [0], although that one does use LaTeX and Tex; and targets a WYSIWYM approach [1]
[0] https://www.lyx.org/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYM
The name is TeXmacs - but "Notice that TeXmacs is not based on TeX/LaTeX." I wonder why they chose that name.
Early on in my computing life, I discovered TeXmacs as a user interface for a Computer Algebra System I had been playing with called Axiom. Ironically, this was before I had ever even heard of either TeX or Emacs! It seemed like a cool piece of software, but when I later learned LaTeX I discovered I prefer non-WYSIWYG for everything but lecture notes. Still, in the years since I've recognized that this setup, combining a math engine with a rich display interface, was an early version of what would later be popularized as Notebooks.
There is also a fork of TeXmacs called Mogan https://github.com/MoganLab/mogan
Fragmenting emacs decades after the fact? Could also use this with the neo keyboard layout that has scientific notation at a glance.
I love TeXmacs so much I just use it as a regular word processor
I am not using it, but I bought the book a few years ago because I think it is a cool project.
Such a weird project, starting with the weird name that sets all kinds of wrong expectations
Texmacs
Video