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/ , emacs, and pdf-tools.
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.
Some important LaTeX packages have workarounds or direct support. For example, you can still render your Tikz images in Texmacs, there is a Tikz repl, but afaik it needs some work. Or just import them as pdf and write the rest of the document in Texmacs.
You can customize the typsetting macros just by altering the texmacs file preamble, similar to how latex has a preamble, so do texmacs files.
No tool will have a standard library as big as TeX/LaTeX when it is created, if that is the bar you set for new software, then you will use TeX forever. That is fine, but maybe better tools can be created, they just require some investment.
someone once described this to me as “treating latex as the IR” which seems relatively correct; for me, it’s a nice way to square the circle of “i want *.tex eventually, but i’d like to write it without as much fuss”.
TeXmacs isn’t new software that was just created, though.
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.