Another good WYSIWYG front end is LyX: www.lyx.org . I've written a few hundred physics lecture notes with it, as well as a number of Beamer presentations. I find it much easier to use than TeXmacs (mainly because of keyboard shortcuts), and the output is excellent. And yes, it produces true TeX/LaTeX.

LyX is good but the quality of the typesetter is not. Early on, when looking for a replacement for my TeX workflow I was taken back by the rendering. It improved lately, but still TeXmacs is a superior tecnology which renders onscreen exactly as on paper, and it is fully scriptable in scheme, including the user interface. I use it to lecture online, via Zoom, for example and I would not be able to do the same with LyX. See e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL50D2PpswE Also thinking about mathematics in TeXmacs is really pleasant. I wrote here my reflection on mathematical writing in TeXmacs: https://texmacs.github.io/notes/docs/art-of-math-writing.htm...

Before starting to use TeXmacs I tried LyX. It is true that the typesetting is not optimal, as often pointed out by TeXmacs users, but for me that was not a dealbreaker. I found LyX to be extremely un-customizable. TeXmacs has Scheme that allows you to do potentially anything! That made me very happy coming from Emacs land.

An important thing for me was having context-aware keyboard shortcuts (that are barely possible in LyX).

Another cool thing that seems to be possible that I plan on exploring next is integrating math typing in TeXmacs with sympy and or Maxima. This would allow symbolic manipulation using the above packages directly in TeXmacs.

Finding Lyx when I was at university saved me an immense amount of frustration while producing beautiful output. My girlfriend used Word 95 and I spent many more hours helping her format and fix her projects than I ever spent dealing with issues in Lyx. Once I had it setup how I needed it it just works.

TeXmacs is not a front-end for LaTeX, but a completely original system, superior to TeX and LaTeX under every point of view: typographic quality, ease of use, control over your document.

I concur. LyX makes things order of magnitude easier for a casual latex user like me.

>Try TeXmacs, it's neither TeX nor it's Emacs clone.

Seems to be about the worst name they could have chosen then

We seldom choose our names, ourselves. The name was chosen early on to pay due respect to the two main sources of inspiration: the TeX system and the Emacs editor. TeXmacs takes the good features of both, but just because I have the same name as your parents it does not mean I'm the same kind of person. A family is not a clone hierarchy. One can argue that Javascript also has the wrong name, there are reason for this, but usually this does not stop people to appreciate the good sides.

Any published papers that use this?

You can check all of the papers of Joris van der Hoeven (https://www.texmacs.org/joris/main/publs.html) and of Massimiliano Gubinelli (https://www.hcm.uni-bonn.de/people/faculty/publications/?tx_...), and as well these lecture notes the link to which was recently posted on the TeXmacs forums https://www.jonmsterling.com/papers/sterling:2022:wg6.pdf (link to the forum post http://forum.texmacs.cn/t/sharing-some-lecture-notes-created...). The papers of vdH you find in his website are converted from the TeXmacs format into pdf (one can find the TeXmacs sources too by each paper) and the papers of Gubinelli as far as I know are written using TeXmacs but since he puts the links to the journals there you get a version converted from the TeXmacs format into LaTeX.

I write all my papers with it since few years, and my lecture notes, and my talks. The papers are converted to LaTeX when sending to the publisher. Several of my PhD students used it to write their thesis. Also some Master students.

Some pointers here: Papers: - https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.09637 - https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.05562 - https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.12115 Lecture notes: - https://www.iam.uni-bonn.de/abteilung-gubinelli/teaching/sto... Online lectures with TeXmacs: - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL50D2PpswE&t=4990s

I recently published a paper [1] that I wrote using TeXmacs and then converted to LaTeX before publishing it on arXiv. The conversion was not completely seamless: it took me around 2 hours to tweak it to my liking. However, I feel that I would not have been able to finish the paper without TeXmacs. Honestly, 2 hours was a fair trade-off. Probably I would have spent a similar amount of time aligning equations by hand once I was done with writing. Texmacs -> LaTeX conversion actually made that part more streamlined.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.09851

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