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.
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
wbolt 4 hours ago [-]
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.
GiovanniP 54 minutes ago [-]
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.
natemcintosh 2 hours ago [-]
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.
zaik 40 minutes ago [-]
I used it as a high school student. In college I switched to LaTeX.
honktime 2 hours ago [-]
A parent of mine uses it afaik , he's been doing academia for about 40 years, so perhaps that is related.
rustyhancock 4 hours ago [-]
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.
alpaca128 3 hours ago [-]
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.
GiovanniP 44 minutes ago [-]
It has to do with LaTeX and emacs in intent.
LaTeX: accomplished typography
emacs: control of the interface
It delivers.
cosmiceggnog 2 hours ago [-]
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
kkylin 2 hours ago [-]
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.
bjobjobjo 4 hours ago [-]
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.
leephillips 1 hours ago [-]
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.
kleiba 3 hours ago [-]
Is Typst getting some traction recently?
lejalv 1 hours ago [-]
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).
gudzpoz 4 hours ago [-]
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.
kbr2000 2 hours ago [-]
Reminds me mostly of LyX [0], although that one does use LaTeX and Tex; and targets a WYSIWYM approach [1]
Superior to LyX: fully WYSIWYG, no limitation on what it can do.
bombcar 5 hours ago [-]
The name is TeXmacs - but "Notice that TeXmacs is not based on TeX/LaTeX." I wonder why they chose that name.
haunter 5 hours ago [-]
Neither on emacs and nor it’s a Mac first app. Probably the most misleading app name ever.
munk-a 5 hours ago [-]
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."
lo_zamoyski 4 hours ago [-]
Perhaps it's like "Javascript", trading on association rather than on substance.
egorelik 4 hours ago [-]
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.
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
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 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.
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'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.
LaTeX: accomplished typography emacs: control of the interface
It delivers.
I tried it some years ago out of curiosity. Did not seem useful.
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.
[0] https://www.lyx.org/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYM