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Ask HN: Did TeXmacs' doubly misleading name hold it back for 20 years?
TeXmacs is not based on TeX nor emacs. It is merely inspired by both.
Do you think the doubly misleading name has held back this WYSIWYG scientific editor with quality comparable to TeX/LaTeX for two decades?
- PaulHoule 4y agoYes.
- cpach 4y agoI agree. Very probable IMHO.
- aquariusDue 4y agoDefinitely.
- dinkblam 4y ago> not based on TeX nor emacs i'd could also see the name implying connection to Mexican food or Macintosh computers.
- cahooon 4y agoWow, yep. I’d heard of it, and due to the name I never even bothered to look at it til seeing this post. Looks like amazing software.
- 2b3a51 4y agoCompare TeXmacs and LyX as visual scientific writing applications. I have dipped my toe into TeXmacs (and bought a copy of The Jolly Writer to support the project). Basically you can walk up, bang out a couple of pages with text, mathematics, diagrams and (say) R script output nicely typeset and save as PDF or whatever. Ideal for quick papers and such. TeXmacs does need a few processor cycles compared with LyX but you won't notice battery drain unduly on anything post Core Duo. Addressing the actual question: I think a tag line like 'your libre scientific wordprocessor' would help.
- xenonite 4y agoI prefer using TeXstudio as a TeX editor. Naturally, I thought that TeXmacs is the pendant in Emacs. Up to this point it did not occur to me that TeXmacs is _not_ using TeX at all. I guess that I am not alone with that thought. Does it use Emacs, then?
- amichail 4y agoIt doesn't use emacs either. It is only inspired by it.
- hprotagonist 4y agoit doesn’t. auctex does: https://www.gnu.org/software/auctex/ https://www.gnu.org/software/auctex/
- davrosthedalek 4y agoOne could argue that it is held back by not being based on TeX (depends on how good the export is) and emacs (probably).
- GiovanniP 4y agoHere as far as I understand the fact that TeX is a Turing-complete language makes it impossible to write a converter for TeX. I read a post by Joris van der Hoeven where he said that TeX held back every other program by making it impossible to write converters. I did not find that post so I link to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27604311 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27604311 where he talks about the same issue.
- dragonwriter 4y ago> Here as far as I understand the fact that TeX is a Turing-complete language makes it impossible to write a converter for TeX. Converters whose source, target, or both are Turing complete languages are... not uncommon in computing.
- wosined 4y agoThe exporter is very good. There is also an importer, which can import latex. It can import almost all standard latex macros one to one. You can convert org-mode files into texmacs files by exporting to latex and then importing the latex into texmacs. Emacs cannot render latex with such quality even with image previews. Trust me, I'm using Emacs. The typesetting algorithm is based on TeX, but it is a custom rewrite with tweaks afaik. There are interfaces to python, maxima, octave, matlab, asymptote, graphviz, sympy etc. that let you type the code into the buffer and see the graphical output of those programs, i.e. figures. Similar to a notebook. Texmacs can typeset the symbolic equations that you get from maxima, so you don't have to see the source code with code syntax but the result a rendered equation. Does emacs have a repl that returns rendered equations? It is also possible to use the python, maxima, etc. plugins to evaluate expressions in the body of your text in a texmacs file. You can create presentations with animations with interactive code sessions and typeset all the math in the presentation with the algorithm derived from TeX. The main implementation uses gnu guile as an extension language, thus if you like Emacs lisp you will get along with texmacs too. You can link texmacs files together and create a wiki structure (think org-mode links etc.) and you can export this structure into HTML. This allows you to write a website in texmacs and then export it into HTML with your custom css. You can typesetting algorithms in the same manner as with the algorithm* packages of latex, but with realtime rendering without having to recompile or guess the layout. Texmacs also offers Emacs like keybindings so that you can open files with C-x C-f, move the cursor with C-f, C-b, C-n, C-p and other Emacs like bindings.
- Freak_NL 4y agoThe name doesn't help, but while it may produce output out of the box that looks as good as LaTeX, the website also doesn't directly answer another question which matters to people who need to do typesetting things with it that have been solved by others: the huge package ecosystem of LaTeX (and the batteries-included distributions like TeX Live).
- hprotagonist 4y agoBingo. I usually need to lean relatively hard on CTAN, and if you’ve got a niche tool with better UX but no widespread adoption in a very entrenched user base, you’re not going to take over. when i want “texmacs”, i use the other GNU tools: https://www.gnu.org/software/auctex/ https://www.gnu.org/software/auctex/ , emacs, and pdf-tools.
- GiovanniP 4y ago> if you’ve got a niche tool with better UX but no widespread adoption in a very entrenched user base, you’re not going to take over Yet I think that it is necessary to keep promoting TeXmacs, a niche yet nice tool, as the shortcomings of TeX are significant and I think we need a better took for document preparation.
- wosined 4y agoAuctex, emacs and pdf-tools are good tools. I still use them. But you either compile LaTeX often, which gets very tedious once the compile time gets longer for larger documents, or you can get a confusing error message from LaTeX that takes you half an hour to deciper. That is my experience. Texmacs does the job of all of those tools better, except for Emacs, because Texmacs is not yet as big as Emacs, but it has more potential.
- hprotagonist 4y ago> But you either compile LaTeX often, which gets very tedious once the compile time gets longer for larger documents, or you can get a confusing error message from LaTeX that takes you half an hour to deciper. That is my experience. have you played with rubber or latexmk? > Texmacs does the job of all of those tools better except for the “standard library” of the latex/tex/ctan world and vast seas of dependent work in the ecosystem, which i don’t believe it addresses at all, but is the main thrust of my original post.
- gjvc 4y agoYes. I always thought it was a mode for emacs.
- mgubi 4y agoit is not: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H46ON2FB30U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H46ON2FB30U
- II2II 4y agoIt's really hard to say. Producing documents for publication is a big part of the reason for using software like TeX, both because of its capabilities and requirements of the publisher. Given the audience of TeXmacs appears similar to that of TeX, in terms of capabilities but not the requirements of publishers, it was not terribly appealing to a wide audience and a significant factor holding it back for its specialized audience. That said, the name did encourage me to at least look at it back in my university days (a very long time ago). When I found that it was not a front-end for TeX, I simply moved on.
- amichail 4y agoWhat about for producing documents not for publication such as writing up assignments, lecture notes, personal/research notes, etc.?
- GiovanniP 4y agoAnd slide presentations.
- mgubi 4y agoTeX is a typesetting language. Like Postscript. There is no particular reasons humans need to write it. That is the reason LaTeX was invented (and Context). We need formats, like PDF or HTML, to exchange and reliably use informations and describe documents. TeXmacs is a document preparation system from the UI to all the other things needed, in one place, in a uniform architecture. It has its own internal format and it exports to TeX/LaTeX as it can export to HTML or PDF. Publishers do not need TeX to store documents, indeed TeX is no a particularly good way to store data. It is what it is: a typesetting language, not a document description format. So I do not see any conflicts between using TeXmacs and then sending a TeX file to the editor. Anyway in most of the cases them (or nowadays most likely you) need to reformat it to the standards of the particular journal. I (and many others, including the main author of TeXmacs) work in academia and I have no problem using TeXmacs everyday to do my work and then send to the publisher a nice LaTeX file, which I do not have to edit by hand. I'm (mostly) TeX/LaTeX free since 2006 and very happy about this.
- zitterbewegung 4y agoWhen I used to use TeXmacs I would have annoying glitches to the point where I just called back to TeX with regular Emacs. I think its general clunkyness really held it back. The problem now is that people still use regular Emacs and share the TeX file locally or use a service like overleaf that allows for collaboration online. TeXmacs in my opinion tried to solve a problem for a small subset of users that it didn't really catch on.
- mgubi 4y agoI'm not sure what are you referring to. TeXmacs is used everyday by many people, at lest 3/4 of my students wrote their PhD thesis with it, some of them enterely, other the initial draft. All my papers are written with it, lecture notes, presentations, letters. My experience is the same of many other people. Even comparning TeXmacs with AucTeX+Emacs is misleading. Totally different user experience. TeXmacs does not have yet a fully stable collaborative functionality, but the functionality is there and it experimentally work. Maybe one day will be completed and you will not need to rely on a central server to use it, just fire up a TeXmacs instance to be the server and connect the others: https://mobile.twitter.com/gnu_texmacs/status/1391065772533899266 https://mobile.twitter.com/gnu_texmacs/status/13910657725338... So, slowly, but we will be there too. :)
- wodenokoto 4y agoI honestly thought the “Mac” was a reference to Apple computers and thought it was a Mac-only application. To be more specific, I thought it was a Mac utility for creating formulas in latex.
- kzrdude 4y agoThings that are great usually come through anyway. Is that too optimistic? If you think Texmacs is great, maybe it also has come over a threshold to greatness - it wasn't there for all of the past 20 years(?) Things such as your outreach in this post is what's needed for a great program to become more well known. My spontaneous feeling is that it's very upsetting that it has TeX in the name but does not use Tex or Latex.
- sfpotter 4y agoHow does it not use LaTeX? It imports and exports LaTeX, which is a way of using LaTeX. It’s a useful tool in the LaTeX ecosystem.
- wosined 4y agoHe means that the equations in the TeXmacs buffer are not rendered by LaTeX and imported as images (as in Emacs), but by TeXmacs. You can edit each part of the rendered equation in realtime, without having to write source code as in LaTeX, similar to MSWord, but with the typesetting quality of LaTeX and with the movement keys of Emacs.
- kzrdude 4y agoI don't use it, so I don't know. This is how texmacs describe it themselves: “Converters exist for TeX/LaTeX and Html/Mathml. Notice that TeXmacs is not based on TeX/LaTeX.” To me that sounds like a tool that is not for working with Latex, but it can convert in a pinch. It's a different category, it's own thing. Fine, but not Tex/Latex. The “Limitations of the TeXmacs to LaTeX converter” from their webpage sound pretty severe, aligns with this view.
- sfpotter 4y agoIt was a rhetorical question. I understand how TeXmacs works. It does use LaTeX: it contains a usable LaTeX importer/exporter. Yes, the importer and exporter aren’t perfect, but they are used in a nontrivial capacity nevertheless. LaTeX is such an integral part of the research workflow for so many academics that leaving it behind entirely is not an option. So instead many people use TeXmacs to generate LaTeX for submission e.g. to a journal. To me, this means that it is a LaTeX tool. Maybe this is not exactly the intended use case, but here we are.
- medo-bear 4y agohow do you mean 'held back'? do you think quality wise? i think its entirely possible that the developers dont care if its popular or not. they know its great and dont feel the need to market it too much
- b33j0r 4y agoIf this is a problem, no one told Javascript
- marssaxman 4y agoIt was a problem, but everyone was forced to put up with Javascript anyway, and here we are...
- b33j0r 4y agoNot disagreeing but here’s another lens. Applies to TeX as well. “Java” in javascript kinda meant “modern computer programming” to the audience, in a very very inaccurate and zeitgeist-hype-train way. People who thought “oh yeah, I’ve heard of java, and scripting sounds easier than programming,” looked into it. ECMA wasn’t a thing yet, but it might have sounded like a skincare product to those same ears, or something that required college. The buzzwords worked.
- dragonwriter 4y ago> ECMA wasn’t a thing yet ECMA is much older than JS. ECMAScript wasn’t a thing yet, I think you mean.
- b33j0r 4y agoYou are correct, my friend
- fithisux 4y agoI think I need to give it a second try now that I read the comments. I usually work with TexWorks or texstudio.
- mgubi 4y agoYou can give a look at TeXmacs' twitter account for example of what it can do: https://twitter.com/gnu_texmacs https://twitter.com/gnu_texmacs
- elviejo 4y agoThat is a good point. Maybe... I know I didn't look at it because I thought it was an emacs fork like XEmacs.
- jwbowen 4y agoI definitely saw the "macs" bit and never gave it a second thought.