TeXmacs
Summary

On the reasons of abandoning Hexo, or to be fair markdown, and switching to TeXmacs (with no little effort).

Tags: blogging, TeXmacs

After the horrible experience of writing the previous posts I have decided to use a WYSIWYG tool so I can check my math on real time and also easily reference equations, and to hell with everything else.

Let's put some math here

$$\displaystyle e^{i \pi} + 1 = 0$$

I find unbelievable I have ended using a visual editor. I remember being quite abrasive when I was forced to use MS Word in my first job instead of LaTeX. In my defense at that time editing math formulas in Word was a complete pain and they looked horrible although later they became much better.

TeXmacs, which you cand find here, has several options to export math to HTML. I have decided to use MathJax for browser compatibility insted of MathML. It will require Javascript enabled but so be it. The whole site is going to be generated with TeXmacs and I will manually edit the index to add links to the posts for now. Yes it's totally low tech but the most important thing for me right now is how comfortable I feel writing.

I reserve judgement of TeXmacs for the time being although the file format looks quite readable and the editor is designed to be hackable and customizable. I remember trying it some years ago and thinking it was quite slow but it has improved a lot and feels quite responsive. The main problem with TeXmacs I think is its small community although they have been very helpful. I hope to use at least the RSS generator in this repository.

I have converted all my previous posts to TeXmacs to test how hard it is. There are some things that right now feel like a hack. TeXmacs right now is not the editor I want but it's the editor that I think can become what I want.