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GNU Texmacs

texmacs.org

191 pointsremywang61 comments

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.

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

For me, also highly intestering is the internal data model and serialization, see section "TeXmacs' content model" in https://texmacs.github.io/notes/docs/overview.html

The main person behind TeXmacs, Joris van der Hoeven, is also a coauthor on this paper:

"Integer multiplication in time n(log n)" https://annals.math.princeton.edu/2021/193-2/p04

Said paper in html rendered by texmacs [1] and past discussion [2]

1: https://www.texmacs.org/joris/ffnlogn/ffnlogn.html

2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24991447

The animation in presentation mode is really impressive, I’ve never seen something like that not even in ppt

The video is hosted on YouTube. Richard Stallman might have something to say about that.

I prefer the lyx editor.

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.

Reminds me mostly of LyX [0], although that one does use LaTeX and Tex; and targets a WYSIWYM approach [1]

[0] https://www.lyx.org/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYM

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.

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.

Superior to LyX: fully WYSIWYG, no limitation on what it can do.

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.

There is some support for the LaTeX ecosystem from within TeXmacs. If you want a TikZ drawing, you can insert it programmatically into a TeXmacs document in a seamless way---if you have the same font for your TeXmacs document and for LaTeX it will be nicely integrated as far as I know, You can see the blog post https://texmacs.github.io/notes/docs/embedding-tikz-figures-...

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

It has to do with LaTeX and emacs in intent.

LaTeX: accomplished typography emacs: control of the interface

It delivers.

And texmacs.org - seems nothing to do with Org-mode either. How dare they? :)

A parent of mine uses it afaik , he's been doing academia for about 40 years, so perhaps that is related.

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

and LyX is very fast & lightweight. Runs fast and is very responsive even on a raspberry pi.

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.

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.

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.

It is used regularly to write academic papers (examples here <https://www.texmacs.org/joris/main/publs.html>) and thesis, examples here: <https://github.com/texmacs/tm-forge/tree/main/examples/these...> and here <https://texmacs.github.io/notes/docs/example-documents.html>. It is used to write lecture notes and to deliver lectures online (e.g. here https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjXdYclFpynDi7EYP95Ep...). It can be used to produce full static website (e.g. here <https://mgubi.github.io/docs/main.html>, here <https://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/welcome.en.html> and here <https://texmacs.github.io/notes/docs/main.html>). There are not many users, but it is a working software with regular updates, since ~2000. Who compare it to LaTeX or Typst miss the point that it is a software designed to render writing a lot of mathematics easier and more importantly to not loose focus in irrelevant details. It has a visual macro system (see e.g. <https://x.com/gnu_texmacs/status/1251554336842407938>), something I haven't seen elsewhere, in production software. It is a structure editor, and an exploration of the design space in scientific editors. A field which lacks innovation and creativity.

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.

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"

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).

I used it as a high school student. In college I switched to LaTeX.

Is Typst getting some traction recently?

Yes. Many people are migrating to it.

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.

ChatGPT can write TeXmacs documents :)

What is toast? I have not heard of it. I thought you wrote pandoc at first.

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

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

The name is TeXmacs - but "Notice that TeXmacs is not based on TeX/LaTeX." I wonder why they chose that name.

Neither on emacs and nor it’s a Mac first app. Probably the most misleading app name ever.

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."

Perhaps it's like "Javascript", trading on association rather than on substance.

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.

There is also a fork of TeXmacs called Mogan https://github.com/MoganLab/mogan

What was the main motivation for the fork? Looks like texmacs itself is still actively maintained: https://github.com/texmacs/texmacs

Better cjk support I think?

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.

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.

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.

I’m using it since 2006 and it is both quite stable and speedier than any alternative.

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.

The website is also written with TeXmacs

I love TeXmacs so much I just use it as a regular word processor

I am not using it, but I bought the book a few years ago because I think it is a cool project.

Such a weird project, starting with the weird name that sets all kinds of wrong expectations

The name is weird, the project is sound :-)

Fragmenting emacs decades after the fact? Could also use this with the neo keyboard layout that has scientific notation at a glance.

It's an old editor from the end of the nineties and has nothing in common with emacs except the name

Video

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