LyX

I was trying to get out of using MS Office for math work, which is not really the Office sweet spot. An interesting alternative was raw LaTeX, but it was too raw. I found myself dealing with the technicalities of the TeX format instead of expressing the thoughts and ideas. So I looked around on the web and found LyX. So far it is as advertised, it does its stated job of "What You See is What you Mean". And they have really done a good job of providing an editing tool for equations and academic papers. In fact it is very impressive for a purely open source tool with mainly academic support. LyX seems like a very mature platform, with several decades of investment and a solid community. It has all the features I need for writing scientific papers and many that I didn't know I need but still found very useful. One warning though: it is for geeks. It pays to understand the LaTeX format which does effect the behavior of the UI. And configuration is definitely geeky. So is the support community. Small foibles and complaints: (1) Search should highlight the line that is found, not merely the actual found item, since it is hard to notice the highlighted item in a full page of text (2) Try creating some boldface and then removing it with "dissolve". It sort of works but not really. Usability should be improved. Overall great work and I will continue to use LyX. Review is of version 2.3.0 on Windows 10.

The GUI looks cool, and the concept is interesting, but how many LaTeX users use it because they like the output? Many of us use it because we have no choice (academic publications require the math and styles forced by journals, conferences, etc.). LyX didn't work when I tried it in this context. Beware before you download/install the 200 MB!

This program is nice, but doesn't allow editing of the TeX source code. This gets frustrating when I know how to do something in LaTeX but can't find it in the program.