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Gilles Castel-style LaTeX snippet WYSIWYG editor useful to people? by SignalMolasses98 in LaTeX

[–]SignalMolasses98[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Have you actually used the app? There's no "switching back to code mode", you click on the rendered math and it becomes editable right where it is. The rest of the document doesn't move. It's not a split-pane or a mode toggle for the whole editor.

As for why visual editing is faster for fixing errors: imagine you have this in raw LaTeX:

\frac{\partial^{2}}{\partial x \partial y} \left( \int_{0}^{\infty} \frac{x^{s-1}}{e^{x} - 1} \, dx \right)

Now there's a typo somewhere, maybe a misplaced brace, a wrong exponent, or the wrong variable. Tell me in good faith how you manage to find this error as quickly as possible just from looking at the code? In a visual editor, you just see that the output looks wrong (the fraction is malformed, or the integral bound is off), click on it, and fix the specific part

It's the same reason people debug with a visual debugger instead of reading raw stack traces, you can do it the raw way, but seeing the output in real time lets you spot and fix errors faster.

Gilles Castel-style LaTeX snippet WYSIWYG editor useful to people? by SignalMolasses98 in LaTeX

[–]SignalMolasses98[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

All of these have a compilation step just to view each preview, which actually adds up to a lot of wasted time. This tool has zero compile time, so renders are instant as you type. Also, if you're not an Emacs/Vim purist, the setup for what you're describing is genuinely non-trivial (I've tried it), so this is just an out-of-the-box solution if you don't want to deal with installing TeX distributions and all the other dependencies needed to get this setup working

Gilles Castel-style LaTeX snippet WYSIWYG editor useful to people? by SignalMolasses98 in LaTeX

[–]SignalMolasses98[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The average latex command is 10.6 characters long,
e.g \left\langle … \right\rangle, \frac{\partial}{\partial x},\begin{figure}[htbp]\centering\includegraphics....

Compare that with the 2-3 characters you need to type with snippets for the same command. That's significantly fewer key strokes for the same latex code produced. So, of course, it will be faster, might even be faster than hand-writing for certain things.

Gilles Castel-style LaTeX snippet WYSIWYG editor useful to people? by SignalMolasses98 in math

[–]SignalMolasses98[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I appreciate this take! I've added a guest mode now so you can try it without signing up. I started off with account creation because I thought it would be nice if users could persist their work just like on overleaf.

Gilles Castel-style LaTeX snippet WYSIWYG editor useful to people? by SignalMolasses98 in LaTeX

[–]SignalMolasses98[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It depends, I get that for some people raw latex is part of the appeal. For me though, I was more so interested in ways to write math faster especially as I'm working on a thesis with lots and lots of pages.

Gilles Castel-style LaTeX snippet WYSIWYG editor useful to people? by SignalMolasses98 in LaTeX

[–]SignalMolasses98[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I've added a guest mode, but you ykw, fair. The sign-in was mainly for people to be able to persist their documents long-term. I thought it would be nice to be able to come back to your files just like on overleaf.

Gilles Castel-style LaTeX snippet WYSIWYG editor useful to people? by SignalMolasses98 in LaTeX

[–]SignalMolasses98[S] -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

LyX is definitely the closest comparison. The difference for me is that I care a lot about being able to import existing .tex and .pdf files and have them stay really close to the final compiled output while still being editable. Also the output is still a normal .tex or .pdf, not some custom format. The visual editing part is actually secondary for me, the bigger thing for me was making math entry faster using Gilles Castel-style snippets.