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If have come to greatly appreciate Lyx' [1] WYSIWYMean approach. When you are mostly writing code or plaintext markdown is great, but if you have to typeset and edit a lot of formulas using Tex quickly becomes a pain. Lyx allows you to edit them graphically with the standard Tex syntax and displays them while you type which is a huge improvement to just rendering them after you have finished it. Unfortunately the videos I've found online all heavily use the mouse interface to choose subscript, special characters etc. which doesn't do Lyx' real efficiency via keyboard shortcuts justice.

If you want to try it yourself: The most important commands are [ctrl]+[m] to enter math mode (or [ctrl]+[shift]+[m] for display formulas) and [alt]+[m] for a lot of math shortcuts, specifically [alt]+[m] and then any bracket to open matching size adapting brackets of this type. To enter a sum for example press "[ctr]+[shift]+[m]\sum[space]_k=1[space]^\infty[space][space]\frac[space]1[down arrow]k^2[space][space][space]". The shortcut [alt]+[p] and then [space] to choose the paragraphs meaning (section, itemize, standard, …) is also a huge productivity boost.

[1] http://www.lyx.org/WhatIsLyX

>With inline LaTeX previews, we're already surprisingly close. In fact, I'd say that going all the way would be almost a step back. WYSIWYG is ultimately not an ideal editing paradigm: it wins in the short term, being easy to learn, but drags you down in the long term.

That --in the extend that it happens-- is a byproduct of the limitations of current WYSIWYG editors, not something inherent in the idea of WYSIWYG editing.

It's not like we had a lot of brainstorming and innovating solutions competing in this area (in fact, there are only 3, all too similar, major products: Word, Pages and Open Office, of which one has 90% of the users).

Second, what's "inconvenient" and "distracting" for one user, is a must and an inspiration for another.

Not to mention there are several different use cases for WYSIWYG editing, and LaTeX style editing doesn't cover them all. For example it's dreadful for quick experimentation with placement and formatting of small, disparate elements (basically, anything not according to the "spec").

>I've recently started using Quora a bit more. Unlike StackOverflow, they use a WYSIWYG editor. I've found this significantly less convenient than StackOverflow's markdown.

WYSIWYG's strong point is not small website comments.

> That --in the extend that it happens-- is a byproduct of the limitations of current WYSIWYG editors, not something inherent in the idea of WYSIWYG editing.

If WYSIWYG editing is not inherently limited, why do pretty much no editors actually support it? For example, spelling/grammar checkers are useful, but when pseudo-WYSIWYG editors implement them, they underline the text, or change its colour. This colouring and formatting doesn't appear when the document is printed. Hyperlinks are usually hit and miss; sometimes they print as 'blue and underline' (but, of course, are useless), sometimes they don't. Annotations don't print, but they do show on the screen. Automatically-generated content like page numbers are often shown differently, eg. with a grey background. Again, this doesn't appear when printed.

In short, what you see is certainly not what you get; but removing these non-WYSIWYG features would be a step backwards.

I have found WYSIWYM concept (What You See Is What You Mean) and WymEditor[1] in particular a very useful solution, at least for website editing.

Previously I have used Xinha, FSCKEditor and similar, but there was always some problem with the resulting markup. WymEditor copes much better in this regard... (not affiliated, just really like the concept and WymEditor)

[1] https://github.com/wymeditor/wymeditor

>If WYSIWYG editing is not inherently limited, why do pretty much no editors actually support it? For example, spelling/grammar checkers are useful, but when pseudo-WYSIWYG editors implement them, they underline the text, or change its colour. This colouring and formatting doesn't appear when the document is printed.

That's just an extra convinience feature you can turn on or off, and doesn't have anything to do with whether the editor is WYSIWYG or not.

It's not like the program forces you to see red swiggly lines underneath words when editing...

>Hyperlinks are usually hit and miss; sometimes they print as 'blue and underline' (but, of course, are useless), sometimes they don't.

Which is configurable too in all editors I know of. And the "blue and underline" is not exactly useless -- it conveys the information that this part of the document was a hyperlink initially.

>In short, what you see is certainly not what you get

No, it's 99.9% of what you get, minus additional layers of information that people expect to be there, and you can turn on or off.

> It's not like we had a lot of brainstorming and innovating solutions competing in this area (in fact, there are only 3, all too similar, major products: Word, Pages and Open Office, of which one has 90% of the users).

We also had PageMaker, FrameMaker, Word Perfect, Ami Pro.

Framemaker is still alive and well, although confined to the niche of technical publishing.

You might want to give plain TeX a try--it's surprisingly lightweight (once you learn how to change font sizes and/or decide not to care). A lot of the bloat comes from LaTeX and using 'eplain' will give you most of the crossreferencing and bibliography commands (if you need it). Running latexmk -pvc in a separate terminal will give you rebuilt dvis on the fly (or pdfs). AucTeX can generate inline previews for plain tex just as well as LaTeX.

Of course, org mode is the standard recommendation for "emacs based markdown replacement with inline math previews"

What about TeXmacs [1]? I'm not a heavy emacs or (La)TeX user, but when I tried it it felt amazing, with the best of both worlds.

[1] http://www.texmacs.org

I was about to suggest this.

>So here's my idea for a great emacs-based document editor: markdown with inline math previews coupled with a full live preview to the side. All the necessary modes for this already exist

So org-mode has you covered there, basically. Org isn't markdown, but it's close (and full of tons of note-taking features), and you can do inline latex with live preview in org-mode. I use it for notes all the time.

> inline latex with live preview in org-mode

This certainly isn't the default. Could you elaborate more on how you set this up?

Edit: Found my answer. M-x org-preview-latex-fragment, which is bound to C-c C-x C-l.

Edit 2: Hey look, you can get tikz working! Evaluate or add this to your .emacs:

    (add-to-list 'org-latex-packages-alist '("" "tikz" t))
    (setq org-latex-create-formula-image-program 'imagemagick)

Then, type the following into an Org-mode document and press C-c C-x C-l:

    \begin{tikzpicture}[scale=0.1]
    \draw[fill=green] (3,0) circle (9);
    \draw[fill=orange] (1,0) circle (5);
    \draw[fill=blue] (0,0) circle (3);

\end{tikzpicture}

So, Wordperfect 5.1's "reveal codes" from 1989.

I thought working in WordPerfect's text mode was an extremely easy and productive way to do document formatting. Then again, I still remember the little keyboard shortcut cheat sheet [1] at the top of our PC at home.

[1] http://www.retrothing.com/2006/06/wordperfect_51_.html

LyX is a great LaTeX WYSIWYM editor: http://www.lyx.org/

Though I end up just using LaTeX (with memoir class) most of the time, I've always thought LyX hit a sweet spot between strict enforcement of document structure and forcing people to write markup.

For the life of me, I can't figure out why LyX doesn't exist as a collaborative google docs style web app.

I like writelatex.com lately.

Still has the problem of needing to talk collaborators, advisors, and other folk into learning LaTeX. In the alternate reality of my dreams, all people that I work with in an academic environment would write LaTeX and collaborate via GitHub.

I've personally been thinking about some sort of GitHub, LyXified markdown browser plugin, in which collaborators' changes get committed to a separate git branch. Then I die a little inside and soldier on.

Maybe WYSIWYG emacs should use LaTeX on the backend?

LaTeX compilation has never really been fast enough for WYSIWYG, and good luck trying to optimize it.

And all that beauty was practically achieved by WordPerfect 6.0 for DOS, many years ago. IMHO.