| I recently converted myself to using TeXmacs. I did it because I was constantly getting lost in the minutiae of proofs of a large paper I was working on [1] The WYSIWYG aspect of TeXmacs was crucial for me because I was able to "think about math" while working on the PC. When doing things in LaTeX I always found myself thinking on paper and then writing down in TeX. I personally believe that "thinking on paper" is still better for me at the starting stage of mathematical research. However, once the outline of the proof was clear and I needed to clean up details and to write technical proofs then working directly on the PC helped a lot Another fantastic feature of TeXmacs is the "preview on hover" package. If you have a reference to an equation and you put your mouse over it, TeXmacs can show you the equation in a popup. This was very important when I was going over the draft once I have written the proofs and when checking for correctness. I have hundreds of numbered equations and checking that I was citing the correct bound in a proof of a lemma was made much easier by this feature. Before passing to TeXmacs I tried to find way to do this efficiently using LaTeX. Intrestingly enough very few PDF's have a "breadcrumbs" feature for you to be able to jump to a reference and then go "back" to your previous position in the paper. The closest I came was Emacs+Auctex+preview. Since Emacs is scriptable and already has the notion of "mark ring" that is essentially the "breadcrumb" feature, that helped a lot. TeXmacs also has some shortcomings. While it is written in Scheme, I found discoverability and documentation lacking. However, there is a very friendly community of people that are very active on the forum. Any question I had about how to do something was usually answered in at most a day. This is actually great because the "basics" that one needs to work immediately are actually well documented. The things that are hidden are more advanced features. For example, there is math folding [2] that I accidentally discovered browsing the menus and then figured/asked on the forums. I had to ask about how to remove sub-sub-sections from the TOC [3] but, to be fair, even in LaTeX you cannot figure it out unless you know the macro. The thing that I miss most from Emacs is the "self-documenting" nature of all the Lisp (Scheme in the case of TeXmacs) code and functions and the somewhat quirky search/replace functionality in TeXmacs. Honestly, the regexp search and replace (especially with a visual help package) in emacs was very powerful. But I believe the community is actively working on the former. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.09851 [2] http://forum.texmacs.cn/t/folding-computation/551/5 |