Neomacs: Structural Lisp IDE/browser/computing environment (opens in new tab)

Kudos for remembering TeXmacs, for some reason it seems to be seldomly know outside of math-heavy STEM circles although it is a Scheme-programmable structured tree editor worth checking out for general document authoring.

TeXmacs does technical typesetting with similar or better quality than LaTeX (and it does not use LaTeX behind the scenes for typesetting, unlike LyX) and keeps a live representation of the document as a tree that you can query and modify (e.g. using PEGs). It is also fully WYSIWYG (unlike, say, Typst).

Using the graphical mode one can freely position math and images and text on slides with perfect typesetting. And the switch-and-fold environments let you build trees of visibility for arbitrary parts of the document (the most obvious application being having exercises that can be switched to show the solutions).

What is more: in TeXmacs one can be enforce a certain degree (to the extent permitted by the ambiguity in mathematical notation) of semantics for math, so that good-looking expressions can be directly sent to a computer algebra system (CAS) for evaluation (and printed back in a way you can read).

So TeXmacs can interface to CASs and in general any programming language.

In fact, thinking about code editing, am not sure why TeXmacs could not, in principle, be the Scheme-based Emacs that some people have dreamt of (cf. the defunct Guilemacs effort, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23304457). Maybe it will: a dedicated community of hackers led by Darcy is doing experiments in this direction in a friendly fork under the name “Mogan” - https://mogan.app/guide/what-is-mogan.html, although I have no idea what are the plans for Mogan Code.

TeXmacs does not use Electron, so while it does import HTML reasonably, it won't render websites in their full glory. But there was a recent job offer for somebody to work on improving the rudimentary capabilities for collaborative editing, so it might end up offering an alternative to Overleaf.

> how it's different from Lem and Emacs-NG.

Neomacs is not a GNU Emacs clone. It changes the fundamental edited model from text (with text properties) to structured document (i.e. trees). Things done with ASCII art hack and things impossible in Emacs can now be done effortlessly in Neomacs.

> > Neomacs relies on Electron

I wish not either, but it's the pragmatic option for now, to make things work. There's no reason someone couldn’t port it to, say Tauri, or even build a browser engine in Lisp, given enough effort.

> some other great programs

Yes! They inspire me a lot and I learn from them!

https://project-mage.org/ deserves a mention, but it's at the prototypical idea stage for now as far as I know, although the guy seems serious and sincere.

It's known issue for any application that uses Electron but don't have enough money to get Ubuntu to whitelist it (I believe?)

I heard that this can be worked around if someone submit a package to the distro. I have no experience in packaging for distros, and help is welcomed!

> magit

Since last year we have what's a start of Magit in Lem: https://lem-project.github.io/usage/usage/#version-control-w...

It has a status buffer, it can push/pull/commit, stage files and parts of hunks (no arbitrary region yet), list commits (with a handy pagination), manage stashes, do an interactive rebase (no reword yet). It's fast for big codebases (linux kernel) as it doesn't call the git binary a lot. We watch the performance and we have plans to read git blobs natively. I contributed it (https://lisp-journey.gitlab.io/blog/oh-no-i-started-a-magit-...). Working on it is a pleasure as the Lem codebase is very clean and introspectable (and specially so through Lem).

Thanks for your input! I don't org-mode myself but I know it's a killer feature for many. In fact, I think if someone commit to it, they can likely build an even more powerful version of org-mode with a lot less and cleaner code, because Neomacs use arbitrary HTML DOM as its editing representation, and no need for regex/text-property hack. See https://github.com/neomacs-project/neomacs/issues/53 for an example.

That being said, Neomacs definitely need a user base and eco-system for that to happen, but I hope so!

As for magit, I wish one day Neomacs get one as well. For now one can use Neomacs's built in terminal for git.

If you're not using the Orgzly Revived fork then I recommend giving it a try.

Thanks for noting this! I added a copy of the GPL license.

Sure! Screencast sounds like a good idea. Are you able to get Neomacs running? If so, the prebuilt one will start up with a intro buffer which is a good place to start (locally built one will need `M-x manual` to build the manual). There's also an online version at https://neomacs-project.github.io/doc/intro.html

They're not the same level things. Neomacs has an Emacs-y browser inside it, for example. It is also possible to embed arbitrary content in buffer (multiple modes, real tables, canvas, etc) while Emacs is restricted to plain text plus some display property hack to support image. It's possible to have a much more powerful org-mode in Neomacs, although we definitely need a user base and contributors to make that happen... Currently, the API and the model is there, so is the possibility.

I think so unless the Electron app is rich enough to get them whitelisted. Or running with sandbox disabled, but that is even more insecure and I don't feel like to make it default.