Comment by acrefoot

Back in 2008, I was fascinated by TeXmacs’ sessions concept. You could mix rich text with Python, or SAGE. This is long before the days of jupyter and I thought it was the coolest thing. Since TeXmacs isn’t TeX, and people weren’t looking for Python notebooks, it was hard to convince others to try this document processor with Emacs bindings. I still ended up using it for some personal classwork as an undergrad, and slowly watched Jupyter overtake it in polish and adoption.

One killer feature that made it possible to take real-time class notes in TeXmacs is that one could type symbols like Greek letters by typing something like “a” then <tab> to get α. For fast and accurate math entry, TeXmacs > LyX > text editors with completion.