Comment by leephillips
2 days ago
I disagree. Many people abhor WYSIWYG programs, myself included.
Having tried both TeXmacs and Typst¹, it’s easy for me to understand why Typst is rapidly gaining adoption and why, after — how long, over a decade? — essentially nobody uses TeXmacs.
I haven't tried TeXmacs (thanks to the truly abysmal name I assumed it was something to do with Emacs), but I have used LyX and it changed my opinion on WYSIWYG. It isn't a fundamentally flawed idea, it's just that most implementations of it are.
LyX is specifically advertised not as WYSIWYG, but WYSIWYM ('M' = "Mean"). Note how the exported/final document looks very little like the in-UI one.
Typora & Obsidian apply the same ideas to Markdown.
I do think WYSIWYG is an absolutely broken paradigm for anything outside of literally just desktop publishing --- but WYSIWYM has a lot of merit.
Enough that I've been working on a stand-alone Markdown editor component that takes ideas from Typora et al.
I think it is fair to point at a paper where Van der Hoeven argues in detail in favor of the WYSIWYG paradigm:
J. van der Hoeven. GNU TeXmacs: a free, structured, wysiwyg and technical text editor. In Daniel Filipo, editor, Le document au XXI-ième siècle, volume 39–40, pages 39–50. Metz, 14–17 mai 2001. Actes du congrès GUTenberg.
Reproduced at https://www.texmacs.org/Data/TeXmacs.pdf
For why so few people use TeXmacs, it may be that it is because few people believe that it is worth trying, as one would not expect that it works so well :-)
1 reply →
Sure but that's just because they're making a point about how it isn't as shit as WYSIWYG implies. Really, it is WYSIWYG (even if the output doesn't exactly match the editing experience). It's just good WYSIWYG.
Ooo I thought of another example of good WYSIWYG - Qt Creator's form editor. The only good GUI form editor I've used. Again the editing experience doesn't exactly match the output (e.g. some layout features are visible), but it's clearly WYSIWYG. It just doesn't suck like MS Word.