I rediscovered TeXmacs last april, after a very long hiatus. Indeed I tried it in the 2000’s and, while I was really impressed by the features, I really got frustrated and soon got back to edit all my texts with LaTeX.

I gave it another try this year when I tackled some presentations that I intended to point my soon-to-be students to, for them to have a look during the summer and prepare for the new academic year… Nothing fancy, mostly complex numbers and some calculus. The integration of a simple drawing module and not having to look for the most appropriate drawing application to interface with Latex/beamer (and learn to use it) convinced me to choose TeXmacs.

The result are those youtube videos (in French) :

and the TeXmacs source files are there : 

Now, what I’d like to say is that there is a steep learning curve with TeXmacs, even if you’re not computer illiterate.

It would make sense to make TeXmacs my first choice when editing scientific documents, but I am still facing many walls.

An example of difficulty I just encountered and for which I was about to ask for help here : starting from a blank document and inserting a session, be it python or scheme, I wondered how to terminate the session to go back to normal editing, then why not a bit later in the document entering a new session but… close session just terminated the process and I still had a python or a scheme prompt, and typing anything just restarted the process… (according to the documentation, this is not a bug, but a feature, and I understand why it makes sense)

Being with a mac keyboard it took me a very long time to find out that I had to page-down (which doesn’t exist per se on a mac keyboard) to allow to the cursor to go outside the session… Try it with a mouse and not using page-down and you’ll understand I guess my frustration...

For a pdf, maybe watermark protected, I would be willing to pay a good 20 euros… (but maybe not 49…)

Would Joris consider letting us buy a pdf instead ?

Regards,

Pierre-Henri

P.S. : I just received my M1 apple macbook air, and the intel built 1.99.15 version of TeXmacs works just fine and doesn’t feel any slower than with my quadcore-i7 macbook from 2012...