What you're describing is an interesting idea and LyX is sort of like that. Mathematica also works pretty similarly, it has different ways of representing and e

What you're describing is an interesting idea and LyX is sort of like that. Mathematica also works pretty similarly, it has different ways of representing and entering equivalent expressions visually (e.g., TraditionalForm or DisplayForm). You can switch modes for a particular cell and the underlying meaning is preserved. There's also a special escape sequence for entering symbols and a lot of symbols have an equivalence with their obvious operators, for instance "x ∈ X" is equivalent to "Element[x, X]". That said, it's really awful at copy-pasting into other programs my experience. But it does a decent job of exporting explicitly, like for instance with TeXForm. Also, a slightly different thing you can do in Vim is to use the conceal feature to visually "collapse" LaTeX escapes into their unicode characters. For example, the document says "\lambda", but it will display as λ (unless you position the cursor on the same line, so that you can edit it). I find it helps reduce visual clutter a bit. http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=4626 http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=4626