Rendered at 10:51:55 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Netlify.
lejalv 2 days ago [-]
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.
The video is hosted on YouTube. Richard Stallman might have something to say about that.
samoit 1 days ago [-]
I prefer the lyx editor.
gudzpoz 2 days ago [-]
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.
dirk94018 1 days ago [-]
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.
mgubi 21 hours ago [-]
ChatGPT can write TeXmacs documents :)
dfc 22 hours ago [-]
What is toast? I have not heard of it. I thought you wrote pandoc at first.
dirk94018 15 hours ago [-]
toast is sed with a brain. I got tired of cut and paste and made my own tool. Then I decided to let the AI drive and tried toast | bash, pretty good but AIs are terrible at escaping, got annoyed and wrote a shell for AI to use called jam. Wanted a bot to answer my texts, so I wrote iMessage, a cli tool. Now you can do iMessage -c iMessage | toast | iMessage and it answers texts. There is more and now its a startup, Unix re-imagined for AI: https:/linuxtoaster.com
kbr2000 2 days ago [-]
Reminds me mostly of LyX [0], although that one does use LaTeX and Tex; and targets a WYSIWYM approach [1]
I've used LyX for a very long time. It has the best graphical equation editor I've ever used: it natively supports all of the complex structures you'd want, can be used incredibly efficiently via the keyboard (e.g. tab-completion and tab-navigation), and is still incredibly discoverable via GUI.
In general, it's just a very pragmatic layer on top of LaTeX. I've done a lot of complex ad-hoc formatting in it as well.
zelphirkalt 21 hours ago [-]
I like, that one can define macros in LyX. For example I wrote a simple macro that looks like "paren(thing)" which is then translated to "\left(" thing "\right)". This makes it much easier to write formulas, because I don't have to keep track of parens at all. LyX in this way makes it more convenient to write TeX/LaTeX.
GiovanniP 2 days ago [-]
Superior to LyX: fully WYSIWYG, no limitation on what it can do.
nxobject 13 hours ago [-]
On the other hand, you do get the full (La)TeX ecosystem to draw on. If I want to draw a commutative diagram, I can add tikzcd to the preamble, and insert inline TeX to do so.
wbolt 2 days ago [-]
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.
natemcintosh 2 days ago [-]
I used Texmacs all through my Master's degree. I loved it because it was excellent for quickly writing math, and building tables (I had to do this often). It would not have been excellent if I hadn't dedicated time to learning the keyboard shortcuts, but once I did, I could write math faster than writing it, and much faster than writing it in LaTeX. In timed take-home exams, I would just write the whole exam in texmacs because it was the fastest way for me to work.
To a lesser degree I also appreciated that the files have a similar feel to XML; I think it makes a lot of sense for this type of document.
I remember hearing about the macro system, but never looked into it. It sounded neat though.
When creating a technical document these days, I'd probably reach for typst though.
GiovanniP 2 days ago [-]
I use it for all of the pedagogical material I distribute to my high school pupils. It allows me to type quickly and accurately math and explanation with exquisite typography. It allows me to edit freely and with total ease what I have already written: I don't have to look for the point where I have to edit because it is WYSIWYG.
I do not have to collaborate with anyone in writing so it does not matter that there are no users among my colleagues.
In my opinion it is superior to all other systems I tried (I tried many and a lot, and all of the main ones). And, importantly, it is equal or superior to the other systems in _all_ respects.
hakfoo 5 hours ago [-]
20 years ago, I used it a bit for my undergraduate work. Mostly as a "word processor that's prettier than... I suppose at the time, the old WordPerfect 8 for Linux"
RGamma 1 days ago [-]
Years ago I wrote my bachelor's thesis in it. Discovered then that it has a steep learning curve and not too much helpful info if you want to do something not preconfigured.
I still pulled through but the thesis looked really basic in the end, and I learned an important lesson that semester.
Still like what is being attempted though! And yeah, the naming doesn't do it any favors...
rustyhancock 2 days ago [-]
The name alone is hilarious bad.
I'd never heard of it but when I saw the title of this post I practically tripped over myself to click it. Latex and Emacs! From GNU!! How have I not heard of it?
A few lines in to the page. Oh it's nothing to do with either of latex or Emacs.
alpaca128 2 days ago [-]
Just days ago I had a similar experience with GNU gperf. No, it has nothing to do with the profiler on Linux and perf doesn't stand for performance. It's for generating perfect hashmaps.
GiovanniP 2 days ago [-]
It has to do with LaTeX and emacs in intent.
LaTeX: accomplished typography
emacs: control of the interface
It delivers.
iLemming 18 hours ago [-]
And texmacs.org - seems nothing to do with Org-mode either. How dare they? :)
honktime 2 days ago [-]
A parent of mine uses it afaik , he's been doing academia for about 40 years, so perhaps that is related.
cosmiceggnog 2 days ago [-]
I haven’t used Texmacs, but I have used LyX a lot over the years when I’m the only one working on the document. I find the visual rendering of the equations super helpful. LyX also lets you type the equation essentially the same way you’d do in LaTeX
wosined 1 days ago [-]
and LyX is very fast & lightweight. Runs fast and is very responsive even on a raspberry pi.
kkylin 2 days ago [-]
In my couple decades as an academic mathematician I've only ever met one. He was a strong advocate, and got me to install & try it, but I could never convert to using it fulltime.
I used this for note taking in class at my university during a few years. Typing math in TeXmacs felt much quicker than LaTeX, enough so that I was able to keep up with the lecturer's writing on the blackboard.
lejalv 2 days ago [-]
IMO Overleaf is a terrible experience (on the other hand, that's what you get if your ambition for computers in 2026 is batch mode and split-panes).
zaik 2 days ago [-]
I used it as a high school student. In college I switched to LaTeX.
kleiba 2 days ago [-]
Is Typst getting some traction recently?
gaws 18 hours ago [-]
Yes. Many people are migrating to it.
leephillips 2 days ago [-]
Almost nobody uses it because those who might be interested need LaTeX and its packages. This is not LaTeX. (In the future these authors might all be using Typst, but not this thing.)
I tried it some years ago out of curiosity. Did not seem useful.
mgubi 21 hours ago [-]
this is plainly inaccurate. most people only use very few packages, which exists only for legacy reasons, they should be really integrated. TeXmacs provide all things 90% of people need.
phjondot 1 days ago [-]
[dead]
aatayev 1 days ago [-]
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
bombcar 2 days ago [-]
The name is TeXmacs - but "Notice that TeXmacs is not based on TeX/LaTeX." I wonder why they chose that name.
haunter 2 days ago [-]
Neither on emacs and nor it’s a Mac first app. Probably the most misleading app name ever.
munk-a 2 days ago [-]
It isn't compatible with TeX/LaTeX but it does serve the same purpose (and converters are available). I don't disagree it's a weak name, though. The naming implies some sort of rich LaTeX editor plugin for emacs - I need Mike Meyers to leap out and say "Texmacs is neither LaTeX nor Emacs - discuss."
lo_zamoyski 2 days ago [-]
Perhaps it's like "Javascript", trading on association rather than on substance.
F3nd0 1 days ago [-]
It’s heavily inspired by both TeX and Emacs, hence why it’s named after both of those. As if the author had added the best aspects of the two and then some.
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.
qubex 2 days ago [-]
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.
mghackerlady 2 days ago [-]
I love TeXmacs so much I just use it as a regular word processor
auggierose 2 days ago [-]
I am not using it, but I bought the book a few years ago because I think it is a cool project.
krupan 2 days ago [-]
Such a weird project, starting with the weird name that sets all kinds of wrong expectations
GiovanniP 2 days ago [-]
The name is weird, the project is sound :-)
xannabxlle 2 days ago [-]
Fragmenting emacs decades after the fact? Could also use this with the neo keyboard layout that has scientific notation at a glance.
poulpy123 2 days ago [-]
It's an old editor from the end of the nineties and has nothing in common with emacs except the name
WesolyKubeczek 1 days ago [-]
I tried using it in 2002. God, it was slow. It was so freaking slow I jokingly suspected it was calling out to LaTeX and rendered the resulting .dvi file at each keystroke. I knew it wasn’t so, but judging by how much churn every entered character was causing, it could have very well been the case.
anonnon 1 days ago [-]
It's not saying much, but this website is really nice, succinctly telling you what the project is about and what it can do, making all of the relevant links accessible, and having a nice slide show and video demo, and looking fairly slick while doing it.
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
"Integer multiplication in time n(log n)" https://annals.math.princeton.edu/2021/193-2/p04
1: https://www.texmacs.org/joris/ffnlogn/ffnlogn.html
2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24991447
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.
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.
[0] https://www.lyx.org/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYM
In general, it's just a very pragmatic layer on top of LaTeX. I've done a lot of complex ad-hoc formatting in it as well.
With stuff like Overleaf and plugins for modern IDEs, honestly I can’t say LaTeX is a bad experience. It does what it should.
To a lesser degree I also appreciated that the files have a similar feel to XML; I think it makes a lot of sense for this type of document.
I remember hearing about the macro system, but never looked into it. It sounded neat though.
When creating a technical document these days, I'd probably reach for typst though.
I do not have to collaborate with anyone in writing so it does not matter that there are no users among my colleagues.
In my opinion it is superior to all other systems I tried (I tried many and a lot, and all of the main ones). And, importantly, it is equal or superior to the other systems in _all_ respects.
I still pulled through but the thesis looked really basic in the end, and I learned an important lesson that semester.
Still like what is being attempted though! And yeah, the naming doesn't do it any favors...
I'd never heard of it but when I saw the title of this post I practically tripped over myself to click it. Latex and Emacs! From GNU!! How have I not heard of it?
A few lines in to the page. Oh it's nothing to do with either of latex or Emacs.
LaTeX: accomplished typography emacs: control of the interface
It delivers.
I tried it some years ago out of curiosity. Did not seem useful.
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