mgubi (u/mgubi) - Readit News

mgubi commented on GNU Texmacs texmacs.org/tmweb/home/we... · Posted by u/remywang

I tried using it in 2002. God, it was slow. It was so freaking slow I jokingly suspected it was calling out to LaTeX and rendered the resulting .dvi file at each keystroke. I knew it wasn’t so, but judging by how much churn every entered character was causing, it could have very well been the case.

mgubi · 16 days ago

I’m using it since 2006 and it is both quite stable and speedier than any alternative.

mgubi commented on GNU Texmacs texmacs.org/tmweb/home/we... · Posted by u/remywang

anonnon · 17 days ago

It's not saying much, but this website is really nice, succinctly telling you what the project is about and what it can do, making all of the relevant links accessible, and having a nice slide show and video demo, and looking fairly slick while doing it.

mgubi · 16 days ago

The website is also written with TeXmacs

mgubi commented on GNU Texmacs texmacs.org/tmweb/home/we... · Posted by u/remywang

leephillips · 18 days ago

Almost nobody uses it because those who might be interested need LaTeX and its packages. This is not LaTeX. (In the future these authors might all be using Typst, but not this thing.)

I tried it some years ago out of curiosity. Did not seem useful.

mgubi · 17 days ago

this is plainly inaccurate. most people only use very few packages, which exists only for legacy reasons, they should be really integrated. TeXmacs provide all things 90% of people need.

mgubi commented on GNU Texmacs texmacs.org/tmweb/home/we... · Posted by u/remywang

dirk94018 · 18 days ago

TexMacs is great. However, I use LaTeX regularly. Used to keep a cheat sheet of commands I'd forget between documents. Today I can describe what I want in plain English, pipe it through toast, and get the LaTeX back.

LaTeX, vim, sed, awk, the whole Unix toolkit is getting a new lease on life, because their interfaces are text. Text in, text out. An LLM can write you a perfect \begin{tikzpicture} on the first try.

Clicking through a GUI is much harder and instead of the computer doing the work, I feel like I am working. WYSIWYG won because it made functionality discoverable, today we have AI mentors.

mgubi · 17 days ago

ChatGPT can write TeXmacs documents :)

mgubi commented on GNU Texmacs texmacs.org/tmweb/home/we... · Posted by u/remywang

wbolt · 18 days ago

Are there any „real world users” of this? During all my years in academia I haven’t met any. Most just use plain LaTeX. Some do MS Word. Rarely something else. Never Texmacs. This is my experience at least.

With stuff like Overleaf and plugins for modern IDEs, honestly I can’t say LaTeX is a bad experience. It does what it should.

mgubi · 18 days ago

It is used regularly to write academic papers (examples here <https://www.texmacs.org/joris/main/publs.html>) and thesis, examples here: <https://github.com/texmacs/tm-forge/tree/main/examples/these...> and here <https://texmacs.github.io/notes/docs/example-documents.html>. It is used to write lecture notes and to deliver lectures online (e.g. here https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjXdYclFpynDi7EYP95Ep...). It can be used to produce full static website (e.g. here <https://mgubi.github.io/docs/main.html>, here <https://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/welcome.en.html> and here <https://texmacs.github.io/notes/docs/main.html>). There are not many users, but it is a working software with regular updates, since ~2000. Who compare it to LaTeX or Typst miss the point that it is a software designed to render writing a lot of mathematics easier and more importantly to not loose focus in irrelevant details. It has a visual macro system (see e.g. <https://x.com/gnu_texmacs/status/1251554336842407938>), something I haven't seen elsewhere, in production software. It is a structure editor, and an exploration of the design space in scientific editors. A field which lacks innovation and creativity.

mgubi commented on Typst: A Programmable Markup Language for Typesetting [pdf] user.tu-berlin.de/laurmae... · Posted by u/kindaAnIdiot

fermigier · 3 years ago

Impressive, as a Master's thesis, but also as a long-term project.

I've been recently working on a book project, and I've reviewed all the tools available. My current conclusion is that I found nothing that would combine the simplicity of Markdown or Asciidoc with the typographical control of LaTeX.

This project seems to hit the sweet spot.

Is the source code of the thesis available somewhere? Of other works created with Typst? That would help making a more educated bet.

Edit: this doesn't seem to be an open source project. So not what I'm looking for.

mgubi · 3 years ago

Have you considered TeXmacs (www.texmacs.org)? See here a short video describing its features: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H46ON2FB30U and the twitter feed for more examples: https://twitter.com/gnu_texmacs

mgubi commented on The Art of LaTeX: Common mistakes and advice for typesetting proofs fanpu.io/blog/2023/latex-... · Posted by u/fanpu

zzless · 3 years ago

It tells me that beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, i.e. what one may perceive as ugliness, countless others will view as beauty or, at least functionality. I personally think that the ugliest design in existence is Python but I admit my opinion is not common. Moreover, I use Python myself, since syntax is not the only important thing in a language (the ecosystem is Python's undisputable strength). It is also unclear to me what specific 'ugliness' in TeX is fixed by, say TeXmacs. Is TeXmacs internal language dramatically (or any) better than TeX? Does not seem so. The WYSIWYG option? There are WYSIWYG editors for TeX as well.

mgubi · 3 years ago

"here are WYSIWYG editors for TeX as well." not there are not. Apart from TeXmacs I know of no editor which give you on the screen the same result you get on the paper. LyX has not such a feature. If an approximation is ok, then fine, but I do not think you can call it WYSIWYG. Is something else. And it requires a lot of work to do it correctly. You should at least appreciate the technical merits, even if you prefer to use LaTeX for its ecosystem. But as a user of both I see the clear merits of TeXmacs in terms of quality of my work (mathematician), I can focus more on what I'm doing, instead on deciphering the mess of the LaTeX formulas and try to find where to put a correction. I can give online lectures with it, discuss on zoom while scribbling on a TeXmacs document, much of the work I was doing on paper I do now directly on the computer. To me there is a clear difference in the user experience between TeXmacs and LaTeX and I will never go back to write LaTeX if I can help it (I do it sometimes, if my coauthors are using it and do not want to try otherwise).

mgubi commented on The Art of LaTeX: Common mistakes and advice for typesetting proofs fanpu.io/blog/2023/latex-... · Posted by u/fanpu

mgubi · 3 years ago

TeXmacs has its own macro language. The equivalent of \newcommand is \assign together with \macro (yes, TeXmacs has proper first class macros, like any respectable language, e.g. Lisp). And macros arguments can be edited visually, here's an example: https://twitter.com/gnu_texmacs/status/1251554336842407938

mgubi · 3 years ago

you can check also the manual which comes with the program, in the menu Help->Manuals.

mgubi commented on The Art of LaTeX: Common mistakes and advice for typesetting proofs fanpu.io/blog/2023/latex-... · Posted by u/fanpu

ogogmad · 3 years ago

In physics, it's \mathrm dx. In mathematics, it's dx.

mgubi · 3 years ago

In my mathematics is \d x .

mgubi commented on The Art of LaTeX: Common mistakes and advice for typesetting proofs fanpu.io/blog/2023/latex-... · Posted by u/fanpu

ogogmad · 3 years ago

Is there an equivalent of \NewCommand in TexMacs? I can't find anything by Googling.

mgubi · 3 years ago

TeXmacs has its own macro language. The equivalent of \newcommand is \assign together with \macro (yes, TeXmacs has proper first class macros, like any respectable language, e.g. Lisp). And macros arguments can be edited visually, here's an example: https://twitter.com/gnu_texmacs/status/1251554336842407938