I have found this to be more true than makes sense.

Even going with bare TeX is surprisingly nicer for plaintext files than I would have imagined. Yes, figures can be hard. But not really much harder than they are in any other tool. With the bonus that I have never really seen a document regress with the addition of new sections.

Really the hardest part of figures and such is coming up with the actual figure in the first place. Most layout issues are ultimately solved by editing the figure.

20 minutes? I've used LaTeX on and off for a decade and I still feel like I don't really understand it. I mean, I can copy-paste my way to do anything with it, but usually I'm Googling "latex how do I X" over and over.

If you learned it in 20 minutes please point me to the tutorial.

I think the point was if you are doing something that you could otherwise do with markdown, then it really isn't that difficult. Since, for the complicated things, the answer in Markdown is simply that you can't do them.

What is X though? If it's "paragraphs" then fair enough, but if it's "obscure tikz diagram" etc. etc. then that's a different conundrum.

If this is actually a point about latex being difficult to (say) write libraries for then I agree profusely but equally if you are writing latex-without-latex or whatever then you still have to deal with latex's wackiness even if it's got a shiny new frontend with its own quirks.

Some billionaire funding a well designed latex killer would probably be a real gift to science - there is probably a lot of ground to be made up in spreading information (i.e. rendering latex for the web is surprisingly hard) and adding features like (say) structured programming to things like writing mathematics in LaTeX - I'd love for my work to be checked by a CAS automatically for example.

From my experience, doing anything too advanced is a distraction. It sort of ruins the point of latex for me, if I have to use too many tweaks. So I always try to keep it as vanilla as possible.

LaTeX can be fine for some, but it requires either an internet connection (Overleaf) or the use of some custom IDE. If you write in a plain-text editor, custom compilation sucks.

As a personal aside, I can't stand the LaTeX syntax; needing to have a \begin{itemize}, \end{itemize}, \item for every list, as opposed to a simple dash uses way more characters, adds more visual noise, and makes it less pleasant to read when editing. Ditto for something like \begin{tabular} as opposed to a pleasant ascii grid.

No it doesn't.

Write in a plain text editor, have evince open the generated document, it will reload when updated. Then use inotifywatch to generate on save, or just write a hook in your text editor that will update the pdf.

You don't need to use overleaf to get the overleaf experience...

> or just write a hook in your text editor

Ah, the Dropbox comment springs to mind: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

..except it's quite different though?

Adding a hook for compilation in most decent editors is only a few lines of config, and many popular editors (GNU Emacs, vim, m$ vscode) nowadays have packages that have these hooks predefined, so it pretty much just comes down to installing a package, which I hope you don't think is beyond the capabilities of the average user. Alternatively there are editors like texworks which provide exactly this feature out of the box.

Sure, and inotifywatch is probably trivial too - to those who know.

The things you state in the first paragraph are plain wrong.

Maybe you don't have the experience to talk about how it is to use latex in practice, then :) But it will come...