Bingo.

I usually need to lean relatively hard on CTAN, and if you’ve got a niche tool with better UX but no widespread adoption in a very entrenched user base, you’re not going to take over.

when i want “texmacs”, i use the other GNU tools: https://www.gnu.org/software/auctex/ , emacs, and pdf-tools.

> if you’ve got a niche tool with better UX but no widespread adoption in a very entrenched user base, you’re not going to take over

Yet I think that it is necessary to keep promoting TeXmacs, a niche yet nice tool, as the shortcomings of TeX are significant and I think we need a better took for document preparation.

Auctex, emacs and pdf-tools are good tools. I still use them. But you either compile LaTeX often, which gets very tedious once the compile time gets longer for larger documents, or you can get a confusing error message from LaTeX that takes you half an hour to deciper. That is my experience. Texmacs does the job of all of those tools better, except for Emacs, because Texmacs is not yet as big as Emacs, but it has more potential.

> But you either compile LaTeX often, which gets very tedious once the compile time gets longer for larger documents, or you can get a confusing error message from LaTeX that takes you half an hour to deciper. That is my experience.

have you played with rubber or latexmk?

> Texmacs does the job of all of those tools better

except for the “standard library” of the latex/tex/ctan world and vast seas of dependent work in the ecosystem, which i don’t believe it addresses at all, but is the main thrust of my original post.

I don't know what software you are using but, latexmk on my machine takes at least 30seconds to compile a 40 page document with 164 equations and 46 images. Texmacs doesn't have to, it just does the rendering incrementally, references get updated when you insert a new one. You can call an update on the whole buffer, which you normally don't have to, and it updates the same document in less than 6 seconds.

Some important LaTeX packages have workarounds or direct support. For example, you can still render your Tikz images in Texmacs, there is a Tikz repl, but afaik it needs some work. Or just import them as pdf and write the rest of the document in Texmacs.

You can customize the typsetting macros just by altering the texmacs file preamble, similar to how latex has a preamble, so do texmacs files.

No tool will have a standard library as big as TeX/LaTeX when it is created, if that is the bar you set for new software, then you will use TeX forever. That is fine, but maybe better tools can be created, they just require some investment.

post-coffee, it occurred to me that i do have an alternative setup for authoring latex documents that greatly reduces my time spent writing latex — it’s org mode. I can hammer in some raw latex the way you can inline html in markdown, if i have to, but for the most part i don’t need to.

someone once described this to me as “treating latex as the IR” which seems relatively correct; for me, it’s a nice way to square the circle of “i want *.tex eventually, but i’d like to write it without as much fuss”.

> No tool will have a standard library as big as TeX/LaTeX when it is created, if that is the bar you set for new software, then you will use TeX forever.

TeXmacs isn’t new software that was just created, though.

I would really like to have names of packages you use regularly and you think you will miss in any other system. I can think only of TikZ, and again, for targeted purposes like DSL you can always ask TeXmacs to run LaTeX and get the output. See e.g. https://twitter.com/gnu_texmacs/status/1605167149173153793

Packages for chemistry are useful, even if I don't use them myself. Also siunitx needs yet a TeXmacs equivalent (I think https://github.com/pireddag/SIunits/tree/simple is not yet good enough)

For questions about TeXmacs please try the forum at http://forum.texmacs.cn/

This is not our experience as TeXmacs users. 90% of the time you are always using the same features, which are well implemented in TeXmacs. Maybe you can show me some of your documents which require TeX, so that I can understand the uses cases you think about. If you look at documents on arXiv there is no reason not to use it. Of course TeXmacs will never take over but it allows us to focus on the content and not on writing TeX. Time gained for more productive tasks with no backside. I guess people praising LaTeX should give explicit examples of what they mean by "huge package ecosystem", in the sense of a measure of how many of those packages are really used by 80% of the scientific community. And btw, TeXmacs can just run TikZ fine, if you really need it. https://twitter.com/gnu_texmacs/status/1509200571537973255