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Comment by wbolt | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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