Neovim

1) You run latex twice only on really large and complex documents like books, and if you're writing books (not editing, see antipope.org for details) in Word, then you need professional help.

2) Markdown and LaTeX are designed for different tasks. Next you'll be telling me that if you have a leafblower, you have no need for a chainsaw.

3) Find me the structured and annotated data streams first - and show me that the structure and annotations are correct - then lament the lack of a shell that can route them to the programs that don't interpret stdin and stdout and stderr that way anyway.

4) I use vim to write latex when I write latex, but "in a bash shell" doesn't make any sense. You fire up vim from bash, yes, but unless you're trying to do an ex-style editing session, you're not editing in the shell any more than you're editing in the kernel or the tty driver...

- Visual representation of the code structure

- Ability to select any symbol and find semantic uses of it

- For OO code, being able to visuallize the OO graph usage of certain symbols

- Refactoring across the whole project with semantic knowledge (no, search/replace does does not cut it)

- Navigation in third-party libraries deployed in binary format

- Code completion for static/dynamic languages, while showing tooltip documentation

- Graphical visualization of data structures on the debugger

- Background compilation with static analysis

- unit test debugging infrastructure

- integration with modelling tools

- integration with SCM tooling and being able to interact with them directly from the editor. For example, generating a blame file, with navigation across the file revisions.

- integration with continuous integration servers

- integration of developer workflow with task management servers

As an example of such developer workflows, have the IDE talk to Jira, edit the code, automatically bundle it in a workflow that binds the code changes to the Jira issue being worked on, get a Jenkins notification after the code is checked in and gone through the CI system.

Sure you can get part of it in Emacs, after spending a week configuring plugins, with different levels of maturity, and in the end it is still mostly textual.

I am honestly amazed at how feistily every 'hacker' here is defending LaTeX in response to your comment. I agree with you for the most part.

This whole "it's apples to oranges" claim is bullshit. Both Word as well as LaTeX can be used for anything from writing a resume, making a technical paper with a few simple equations, to writing an entire Vector or Linear Algebra textbooks. When you have two options for doing the same task it's very much comparing apples to apples.

Yes, they each were originally built with different objectives and different target markets, but they have since aspired to be usable for all the same things. Of course, they each have their strengths and weaknesses.

But I don't get how do a bunch of folk here feel justified in arguing against someone saying "there's room for improvement" with clear viable suggestions on the details too. I know that hating on MSWord (or MS-anything) is fashionable on HN. But you can't seriously be defending

* the steep learning curve: throw your 14-year-old who's doing a math assignment Word vs your favourite LaTeX editor, see what happens;

* lack of WYSIWYG-like feedback-loops: you have to wait a full minute on decently sized documents to see the result of adding that equation that took you 10 seconds to add;

* syntax holdups: you miss an underscore and your document is broken. All the way through. And can take an hour to fix even if you're skilled. People writing documents that need LaTeX's power aren't always coders, and debugging is not a fun or planned-for activity for anyone.

I also don't for the life of me see why someone has to "be an expert, not just written a couple documents casually in undergrad" to be able to comment on the flaws of a product. They're as much a user as a power user, and obviously the power users went through that stage too. Losing sight of your past difficulties (or being gifted in LaTeX) doesn't make them irrelevant for people not in your current position.

Loosely relevant: I smell hardcore "hacker entitlement" around people using LaTeX and defending it including all its stupid barriers to easy document-creation tooth and nail. Hardcore programmers do this with way too many things (like Linux, and development environments for almost any language). And it's just really frustrating for a lot of people to deal with =/

PS: NeoVim sounds like someone finally got off their high horse (or from whining) and decided to actually make something better. Thanks!

One could easily remove then fan on the leefblower engine and add a saw blade.

Writing my thesis with markdown was one of the best decisions i made. I wrote 99% of my master thesis in markdown (50 pages w/o interviews). 1) I didn't have a lot of images so i just wrote FIXME: Image Foo.png where they belonged. 2) I wrote my Citations Plain in there (e.g. Wocken, 1985, 7 ff.), using a special folder for all sources i really used in Mendeley. 3) Writing in markdown i could just c&p perfectly formatted chapters written with simplenote. 4) i also could seperate the chapters in files and keep everything in a git repo.

When i was finnished writing i exported the markdown to rtf, 1) selected all the h1's via "select all", set them to be a real (word) h1. vice versa with all other styles i used. 2) Then i put in all the pictures. 3) Then i exported the list from Mendeley.

That process - from markdown to perfection - took me less than 4 hours.

I have some experience with latex and especially latex + komascript, but i hated that experience because the latex sourcecode doesn't ebrace readability and you're sure to get obscure errors in the last second. besides stuff like running latex twice for a table of contents.

Writing

  \begin{itemize}
    \item really long line which gets wrangled in my vim 
  terminal, so that i don't see where the second item starts.
    \item another long line. maybe 200 characters long?
  \end{itemize}

is complicated and you can't read it well. this otoh is very easy to read:

  * really long line which gets wrangled as well, but is 
  better to read because it starts with a clear sign which 
  is recognized to be a bullet.
  * next line, which is also very long.

Easy readability is crucial, because i needed proof readers. The young proof readers could actually get the markdown code and correct my mistakes there (or write comments, starting with another fixme). really rocked with diff.

The older proofreaders could proofread it in the final stage in ms word with the track changes functionality.

I put a lot of thought into Design and Typography and i was sure that i could decide better how my document should look, than latex. I agree, that for some people this is not the case.