GNU Texmacs
texmacs.org97 points by remywang 7 hours ago
97 points by remywang 7 hours ago
It's easy to miss the video on the front page, which I find provides a great visual summary of features and will make you understand why other commenters are praising how efficient (and pleasurable, I might add!) TeXmacs is: https://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/videos.en.html.
You can find some example documents here https://texmacs.github.io/notes/docs/example-documents.html.
Other posts on the TeXmacs notes site discuss programmability with Scheme, typesetting math (https://texmacs.github.io/notes/docs/texmacs-math-typesettin..., shows how good the HTML export is), and more.
The best in-depth reference, even counting the astoundingly complete bundled manual, remains The Jolly Writer. It is a beautifully typeset book, available at https://www.scypress.com/book_download.html.
EDIT: missing link, typo
The main person behind TeXmacs, Joris van der Hoeven, is also a coauthor on this paper:
"Integer multiplication in time n(log n)" https://annals.math.princeton.edu/2021/193-2/p04
I had no idea this existed and I’m in love. I’ve been using LATEX for more than twenty years and most of my use cases would’ve been covered by this. It’s going to be a fixture for the second half of my life and they can pry it out of my cold, dead hands.
Are there any „real world users” of this? During all my years in academia I haven’t met any. Most just use plain LaTeX. Some do MS Word. Rarely something else. Never Texmacs. This is my experience at least.
With stuff like Overleaf and plugins for modern IDEs, honestly I can’t say LaTeX is a bad experience. It does what it should.
I used Texmacs all through my Master's degree. I loved it because it was excellent for quickly writing math, and building tables (I had to do this often). It would not have been excellent if I hadn't dedicated time to learning the keyboard shortcuts, but once I did, I could write math faster than writing it, and much faster than writing it in LaTeX. In timed take-home exams, I would just write the whole exam in texmacs because it was the fastest way for me to work.
To a lesser degree I also appreciated that the files have a similar feel to XML; I think it makes a lot of sense for this type of document.
I remember hearing about the macro system, but never looked into it. It sounded neat though.
When creating a technical document these days, I'd probably reach for typst though.
I use it for all of the pedagogical material I distribute to my high school pupils. It allows me to type quickly and accurately math and explanation with exquisite typography. It allows me to edit freely and with total ease what I have already written: I don't have to look for the point where I have to edit because it is WYSIWYG.
I do not have to collaborate with anyone in writing so it does not matter that there are no users among my colleagues.
In my opinion it is superior to all other systems I tried (I tried many and a lot, and all of the main ones). And, importantly, it is equal or superior to the other systems in _all_ respects.
It is used regularly to write academic papers (examples here <https://www.texmacs.org/joris/main/publs.html>) and thesis, examples here: <https://github.com/texmacs/tm-forge/tree/main/examples/these...> and here <https://texmacs.github.io/notes/docs/example-documents.html>. It is used to write lecture notes and to deliver lectures online (e.g. here https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjXdYclFpynDi7EYP95Ep...). It can be used to produce full static website (e.g. here <https://mgubi.github.io/docs/main.html>, here <https://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/welcome.en.html> and here <https://texmacs.github.io/notes/docs/main.html>). There are not many users, but it is a working software with regular updates, since ~2000. Who compare it to LaTeX or Typst miss the point that it is a software designed to render writing a lot of mathematics easier and more importantly to not loose focus in irrelevant details. It has a visual macro system (see e.g. <https://x.com/gnu_texmacs/status/1251554336842407938>), something I haven't seen elsewhere, in production software. It is a structure editor, and an exploration of the design space in scientific editors. A field which lacks innovation and creativity.
The name alone is hilarious bad.
I'd never heard of it but when I saw the title of this post I practically tripped over myself to click it. Latex and Emacs! From GNU!! How have I not heard of it?
A few lines in to the page. Oh it's nothing to do with either of latex or Emacs.
Just days ago I had a similar experience with GNU gperf. No, it has nothing to do with the profiler on Linux and perf doesn't stand for performance. It's for generating perfect hashmaps.
It has to do with LaTeX and emacs in intent.
LaTeX: accomplished typography emacs: control of the interface
It delivers.
A parent of mine uses it afaik , he's been doing academia for about 40 years, so perhaps that is related.
I haven’t used Texmacs, but I have used LyX a lot over the years when I’m the only one working on the document. I find the visual rendering of the equations super helpful. LyX also lets you type the equation essentially the same way you’d do in LaTeX
In my couple decades as an academic mathematician I've only ever met one. He was a strong advocate, and got me to install & try it, but I could never convert to using it fulltime.
I used this for note taking in class at my university during a few years. Typing math in TeXmacs felt much quicker than LaTeX, enough so that I was able to keep up with the lecturer's writing on the blackboard.
Almost nobody uses it because those who might be interested need LaTeX and its packages. This is not LaTeX. (In the future these authors might all be using Typst, but not this thing.)
I tried it some years ago out of curiosity. Did not seem useful.
IMO Overleaf is a terrible experience (on the other hand, that's what you get if your ambition for computers in 2026 is batch mode and split-panes).
You can try TeXmacs in your browser at https://yufeng-shen.github.io/Mogan.html . (It's actually from a fork of TeXmacs called Mogan, of which I've been a happy user due to better CJK support.)
By the way, I do think TeXmacs is an Emacsen as it provides Guile/Scheme as an extension language, though I don't know how customizable it is. (I think the built-in REPLs for Python/Maxima/Scheme/... are written in Scheme.) And then, it does support quite some TeX commands (and you input them by pressing backslash followed by their command name), so I do think their "TeXmacs" name is very much justified.
The name is TeXmacs - but "Notice that TeXmacs is not based on TeX/LaTeX." I wonder why they chose that name.
Neither on emacs and nor it’s a Mac first app. Probably the most misleading app name ever.
It isn't compatible with TeX/LaTeX but it does serve the same purpose (and converters are available). I don't disagree it's a weak name, though. The naming implies some sort of rich LaTeX editor plugin for emacs - I need Mike Meyers to leap out and say "Texmacs is neither LaTeX nor Emacs - discuss."
Perhaps it's like "Javascript", trading on association rather than on substance.
Reminds me mostly of LyX [0], although that one does use LaTeX and Tex; and targets a WYSIWYM approach [1]
Early on in my computing life, I discovered TeXmacs as a user interface for a Computer Algebra System I had been playing with called Axiom. Ironically, this was before I had ever even heard of either TeX or Emacs! It seemed like a cool piece of software, but when I later learned LaTeX I discovered I prefer non-WYSIWYG for everything but lecture notes. Still, in the years since I've recognized that this setup, combining a math engine with a rich display interface, was an early version of what would later be popularized as Notebooks.
There is also a fork of TeXmacs called Mogan https://github.com/MoganLab/mogan
What was the main motivation for the fork? Looks like texmacs itself is still actively maintained: https://github.com/texmacs/texmacs
I am not using it, but I bought the book a few years ago because I think it is a cool project.
I love TeXmacs so much I just use it as a regular word processor
Such a weird project, starting with the weird name that sets all kinds of wrong expectations