[mlthoughts2018]

“the ease of use of a graphical interface”

Why do people think this is a thing? Whether I’m making a poster or slides in latex / beamer, dealing with spreadsheet data with pandas in an ipython console, programmatically checking email, writing code in emacs no window mode, or virtually anything else I do with a computer, perhaps the hugest rule of thumb is to avoid GUIs at all costs, they are the biggest productivity killer.

I know people will chime in with their opposing experiences, but it’s just noise to me. Sure, there are limited good uses for GUIs, but I cannot fathom at all how writing tex documents could be one. Doesn’t matter if you’re totally new to it or been doing it for years, anything taking your hand away from the keyboard to deal with menus is killing you.

If you want wysiwyg-like behavior, just open another shell tab with a permanently running job that detects changes to your source file, re-runs whatever document compilation command you use, and refreshes evince or some other viewer that you never interact with except to look at. Spending time learning this way of working from the start is worth far more than spending relatively less time on the first few documents in lyx.