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by lutusp 4870 days ago
> I am a long-term Latex user and have recently tried one of those online editors. I have two basic gripes with all of them: It's not vim and I don't want to put my papers onto someone else's cloud.

Fair enough -- use Lyx. It's free and open source. It doesn't require you to take the security and other risks of a cloud scheme.

http://www.lyx.org/

I don't understand why more people don't use Lyx for Latex production. It's not as slick as some Web-based apps, but it also doesn't have their drawbacks.
4 comments
adimitrov 4870 days ago
> I don't understand why more people don't use Lyx for Latex production.

LyX is still not Vim. Or Emacs, for that matter. That may sound a little closed-minded, but when you basically spend your entire life in one editor (as a programmer) adapting to a different editor is a big pain, and very frustrating, because nothing works the way you expected it.

In my experience emulation of these editors in others is shoddy at best (I'm looking at you, SublimeText.) Not to mention I'm losing my favorite plugins, that I've grown used to. The only acceptable Vim emulation I've seen is Evil — for Emacs. And even there I couldn't stand to use it.

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lutusp 4870 days ago
> LyX is still not Vim. Or Emacs, for that matter.

All true. It took a while for me to be productive with Lyx -- it's too different from most other editing environments. In fact, one of the first things they say in their documentation is that Lyx isn't a text editor -- it's really meant for document creation, not everyday editing. So that's an entirely valid criticism.

Nevertheless, after one ascends the difficult learning curve, the results can be beautiful, classic LaTex output, with little effort.

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jahewson 4870 days ago
I used LyX for about a year and in that time it tuned from a dream into a nightmare. The problem is that at some point if your typesetting is complex then you need some LaTeX package that LyX doesn't support and have to resort to inline TeX code. The horrid LaTeX code that LyX generates does not play nice and a huge amount of time gets wasted trying to find a LyX-friendly way to express something which would have been a few lines of LaTeX. Don't even get me started on Lyx's Rube Goldberg support for custom document classes.
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lutusp 4870 days ago
Your use of Lyx is of longer duration and at a deeper level than mine, so ... thank you for posting.
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Surio 4870 days ago
I don't have a problem about "geeking out" with LaTeX `\' slashes, but frankly, what you mention about LyX is right. Thought you might appreciate this writeup by someone else who also agrees on your LyX viewpoint....

http://yihui.name/en/2012/10/lyx-vs-latex/

Enjoy the read.

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pseut 4870 days ago
When I used LyX (years ago) typing in equations was slow and buggy (slow means anything longer than typing in text). Plus it doesn't/didn't export very clean source code and, for people who have used latex in a text editor even for only 3 or 4 years, the menus and toolbars are completely unnecessary: I know 99.9% of the macros I use and the ones I don't know are esoteric.

    latexmk -pvc
gives continuous compilation from the command line FWIW.
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