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Comment by neel_k | Hacker News Reader

TeXmacs is a marvel, and for literally decades I've wondered why it hasn't seen broader adoption.

Decades ago at least it used to crash and eat your data, which I think is a pretty strong barrier to adoption for software that holds important data of yours in its own proprietary format. I just tried the most recent version, and after two decades it still feels pretty alpha quality (Menu -> Quit Texmacs -> no effect; extremely laggy; low-res icons etc.).

>for software that holds important data of yours in its own proprietary format

This seems like an odd description. TeXmacs may be the only implementation of the format, but it seems well-documented and the code is all free software. I don't think I'd call it a proprietary format.

I tried it a few months ago because i really prefer GUI tools to entering weird codes in text files (and i'm saying that as someone who has made his own tools with his own weird codes :-P) and it felt very "alpha quality" to me too. It would randomly crash or hang, losing changes or do nothing and when it worked it would feel sluggish. To test it out i tried to replicate some pages from the first section of the original Turbo Pascal 3 manual (which is mostly text) but i could barely do more than two pages.

I like the idea, but the execution wasn't that good. It really didn't felt as something i could rely on at all.

Many of us use everyday (me included, typing papers of +60 pages on monthly basis). There are still some rugged edges in the GUI but is certainly not alpha quality software. The Qt interface have been there since at least 2009 and nowadays we have one or two nasty bugs which we plan to address in the following months but nothing serious. As you can see from these videos (here https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjXdYclFpynD0ufg_pp-5... ) all is quite stable. Unfortunately TeXmacs stress many corners of the Qt/Mac port and we need to go around bugs there constantly. If you experience more reproductible crashes then would be good to know, either show up in the mailing list or file a bug report in Savannah. If nobody complains we cannot fix them :)

Doesn't this have the same problem as lyx but worse? It might be nice for you to use, but sharing your files with colleagues doesn't work well and submitting to journals (converted to tex) also does not work well.

It does not. I used it every day for academic research. Most of my papers converts right away to TeX for publications. Of course your have to collaborate with similarly minded people. But sometimes I just write my part in TeXmacs and then copy and paste in the collaborative LaTeX file. YMMV. And you can use it to do online lecture (not quite like LyX) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyVc6wKE8Oc

How well does the reverse process work? If your collaborators make changes to the TeX, is there a way to sync the two together?

We tend to use git repos + XeLaTeX in my group.

Back and forth conversion is not fully supported, we try to have good match (see e.g. https://www.texmacs.org/joris/latexconv/latexconv.pdf ). TeXmacs has its own format, so no: you cannot collaborate with people which want to edit LaTeX files. But you can convince them to use TeXmacs. :) I've never regretted. I go back to LaTeX sometimes but most of my documents are now created in TeXmacs. If you need a tool to collaborate then use things like Lyx or TeXstudio, etc... We had to get away from TeX to remove the intrinsic limitations of that technology. There is not much you can you if you want to stick to complete TeX compatibility.

Joris van der Hoven, the creator of TeXmacs, write most of his papers (and books) with it: https://www.texmacs.org/joris/main/publs.html

There was widespread belief for years that the project was dead. I'm sure that didn't help.

The interface was somewhat clumsy in the early years (around 2005 or so). It wasn't responsive and a lot of things were unintuitive.

Some things simply didn't work. There was a concern that if something broke, it might never be fixed.

Keep in mind that my usage ended about 15 years ago. Maybe it's better now, but LyX was a good alternative, and I've never had a reason to move. It can be hard to overcome a slow start.

Unintuitive interface, does not mean bad. Means just TeXmacs is different from other software (like LyX) for example. But the interface is well thought and carefully implemented. It requires some time to get acquainted but then you can do many things are not possible with other software (like shown here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjXdYclFpynD0ufg_pp-5...) And is not dead. :) We are a small number of developers but the software is used every day to write academic papers with a lot of math from a very affectionate user base. If LyX works well for you no problem. But you should give it yourself some time before making a judgement. It is surely very different from LyX.

Oh, I definitely don't want to discourage anyone from using TeXmacs. It is a great piece of software. I was only explaining my thoughts on why it's not more popular. I think a lot of people would like it if they had ever heard of it.

Seconded. It's a really lovely designed piece of software. it's possibly the only WYSIWYG editor that I prefer to use over the code-based alternative.

edit: the bugs are real though, no denying that.

We are striving to fix most of the big problems before releasing version 2.1 (hopefully this year). Please report the bugs/crashes. Only in this way we can improve it.

Now I've got you - The biggest issue I have with texmacs is how difficult it is to interact with the community.

Your mailing list archive is not indexed by google (except for the narkive version, where search is broken) so answered questions are generally not visible to new users.

The default search in the list archive only searches a single month, this is useless. Searching multiple months is non-obvious.

Some project-deaf suggestions from this outsider are:

- put your lists on Google Groups so they are easily searchable and findable for new users

- just put the damn thing on GitHub and use their Issues system (or GitLab or at least something that isn't Savannah).

It might be a bit annoying for current project members to get the hang of it but I think, in 2020, it is very difficult to grow and show off a community that's based on GNU Savannah!

I can agree on the mailing, I will discuss your remarks with the other developers. We are trying to support also other "community platforms", so we have now a forum:

http://forum.texmacs.cn

a Gitter room:

https://gitter.im/texmacs/Lobby

and a GitHub mirror here:

https://github.com/texmacs/texmacs

where you can post PR. As for Bugs we prefer the savannah bug tracker but if you post something on GitHub we will take it in consideration too.

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