GNU TeXmacs and Structured Text Editing

Joris van der Hoeven writes "It is a common belief that structured texts are best conceived using ASCII-based text editors like Emacs or VI. It is true that word processors like MS-Word have done a bad job on this issue. But does this mean that wysiwyg structured text editing would be impossible? We firmly believe the contrary and argue that such editors are both technically conceivable and desirable. Judge for yourself by taking a look at the GNU TeXmacs program, whose version 1.0 has just been released."

Comments

Writing my PhD thesis now...

[PoiBoy]

Right now I am writing the third and final chapter of my thesis (in economics), and I must say that LaTeX is a godsend.

I think this GNU thing suffers from the same problems as LyX, Scientific Workplace, and every other GUI front-end to (La)TeX -- it relies on menus and the mouse.

In the time it takes someone to remove his hand from the keyboard, search through a menu or click a button to make a fraction, and search through another menu or palette to find a gamma, I could have typed \frac{\gamma}{2} ten times.

My experience has been that people look to these things so they don't have to be bothered by knowing all the commands. I think that's a waste of time. After writing one paper using LaTeX, you will have memorized all of the symbols commonly used in your discipline, and you'll soon discover that LaTeX is so much faster than a GUI application.

Spending a couple of hours learning LaTeX is time well spent, and you will certainly be repaid many times over in the long run.