[mkl]

> it’s tooling is abysmal

It seems like you haven't tried many editors. Have you tried TeXStudio (https://www.texstudio.org/)?

> it rarely seems to work except on the person who wrote its machine.

I and many others edit the same documents at the university where I work, without significant issues. Distributions like TeXLive (https://www.tug.org/texlive/) provide a consistent all-inclusive cross-platform solution.

[abritinthebay]

TeXStudio would be a perfect example of its abysmal tooling. It’s better than the CLI tools but it’s an awful editor and highlights how incompatible with a good writing experience LaTeX is.

Yes, many people produce good work in it - it’s output is fantastic after all - but an editor that would have been a substandard user experience in the 90s is the best LaTeX has in tooling.

That’s exactly what I mean!

[diffeomorphism]

Can you try to phrase that more precisely/constructively by including a reason why it is "awful" or give an example of "good tooling"?

As far as editing goes, latexmk, syntax highlighting and good shortcuts are all I ever use and am perfectly happy with (emacs+auctex). It is a different paradigm than WYSIWYG, but different does not say anything about good or bad.

Now writing new latex classes, I agree. That is very unintuitive and would greatly benefit from simplification, templates and tools.

[abritinthebay]

I could go into a long, detailed, breakdown of how bad TeXStudio is but, frankly, if they want UI/UX work they should pay for it. Which they clearly don’t.

It’s... decent enough in the pack of “open source UI” but that isn’t a high bar.

Here’s the thing about that (oft repeated) line about WYSIWYG vs WYSIWYW: it’s bullshit.

There’s no justification for it other than the deficiencies of the tooling and tool chain. It’s an excuse.