Yes. I always thought it was a mode for emacs.
it is not: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H46ON2FB30U
Ask HN: Did TeXmacs' doubly misleading name hold it back for 20 years?
31–40 of 61 posts
Re: Ask HN: Did TeXmacs' doubly misleading name hold it back for 20 years?
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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 mor…
> 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.
Re: Ask HN: Did TeXmacs' doubly misleading name hold it back for 20 years?
#33Things that are great usually come through anyway. Is that too optimistic? If you think Texmacs is great, maybe it also has come over a threshold to greatness - it wasn't there for all of the past 20 years(?) Things such as your outreach in this post is what's needed for a great program to become more well known. My spontaneous feeling is that it's very upsetting that it has TeX in the name but does not use Tex or La…
How does it not use LaTeX? It imports and exports LaTeX, which is a way of using LaTeX. It’s a useful tool in the LaTeX ecosystem.
Re: Ask HN: Did TeXmacs' doubly misleading name hold it back for 20 years?
#34how do you mean 'held back'? do you think quality wise? i think its entirely possible that the developers dont care if its popular or not. they know its great and dont feel the need to market it too much
Re: Ask HN: Did TeXmacs' doubly misleading name hold it back for 20 years?
#35Things that are great usually come through anyway. Is that too optimistic? If you think Texmacs is great, maybe it also has come over a threshold to greatness - it wasn't there for all of the past 20 years(?) Things such as your outreach in this post is what's needed for a great program to become more well known. My spontaneous feeling is that it's very upsetting that it has TeX in the name but does not use Tex or La…
How does it not use LaTeX? It imports and exports LaTeX, which is a way of using LaTeX. It’s a useful tool in the LaTeX ecosystem.
He means that the equations in the TeXmacs buffer are not rendered by LaTeX and imported as images (as in Emacs), but by TeXmacs.
You can edit each part of the rendered equation in realtime, without having to write source code as in LaTeX, similar to MSWord, but with the typesetting quality of LaTeX and with the movement keys of Emacs.
Re: Ask HN: Did TeXmacs' doubly misleading name hold it back for 20 years?
#36If this is a problem, no one told Javascript
Re: Ask HN: Did TeXmacs' doubly misleading name hold it back for 20 years?
#37Things that are great usually come through anyway. Is that too optimistic? If you think Texmacs is great, maybe it also has come over a threshold to greatness - it wasn't there for all of the past 20 years(?) Things such as your outreach in this post is what's needed for a great program to become more well known. My spontaneous feeling is that it's very upsetting that it has TeX in the name but does not use Tex or La…
Installing it sucks. Once I got through that hurdle I liked it. However, I do think most people won't bother if the executable downloaded from the main website just doesn't run.
You can just pick the AppImage if you like Linux. No installation needed. If you are on Mac, then you just need to give permission to run the software, it is not a specific problem of TeXmacs, it happens because TeXmacs executable are not signed. There are many reason you can turn down a software. any software. The point is: to whom are you making a favour? :) TeXmacs is free and make you save a lot of time. So I would say it is worth to spend a bit of it learning to use it properly. To be effective it require you to unlearn some LaTeX habits. But again, it is up to you. What I think is unfair is to deduce from these features that it is not a useful piece of software.
Re: Ask HN: Did TeXmacs' doubly misleading name hold it back for 20 years?
#38Things that are great usually come through anyway. Is that too optimistic? If you think Texmacs is great, maybe it also has come over a threshold to greatness - it wasn't there for all of the past 20 years(?) Things such as your outreach in this post is what's needed for a great program to become more well known. My spontaneous feeling is that it's very upsetting that it has TeX in the name but does not use Tex or La…
How does it not use LaTeX? It imports and exports LaTeX, which is a way of using LaTeX. It’s a useful tool in the LaTeX ecosystem.
I don't use it, so I don't know.
This is how texmacs describe it themselves: “Converters exist for TeX/LaTeX and Html/Mathml. Notice that TeXmacs is not based on TeX/LaTeX.”
To me that sounds like a tool that is not for working with Latex, but it can convert in a pinch. It's a different category, it's own thing. Fine, but not Tex/Latex.
The “Limitations of the TeXmacs to LaTeX converter” from their webpage sound pretty severe, aligns with this view.
Re: Ask HN: Did TeXmacs' doubly misleading name hold it back for 20 years?
#39I think I need to give it a second try now that I read the comments.
I usually work with TexWorks or texstudio.
Re: Ask HN: Did TeXmacs' doubly misleading name hold it back for 20 years?
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Installing it sucks. Once I got through that hurdle I liked it. However, I do think most people won't bother if the executable downloaded from the main website just doesn't run.
You can just pick the AppImage if you like Linux. No installation needed. If you are on Mac, then you just need to give permission to run the software, it is not a specific problem of TeXmacs, it happens because TeXmacs executable are not signed. There are many reason you can turn down a software. any software. The point is: to whom are you making a favour? :) TeXmacs is free and make you save a lot of time. So I wou…
On the other hand if something (in this case ease of installation) helps people to use the tool, then it helps TeXmacs too, which in turn helps users.