Idea: A more friendly version of TeXmacs for high school and undergraduate students

#1

First, the menu items and other GUI elements could be made more friendly by making them more similar to Microsoft Word than a LaTeX editor.

Also, the language used to describe TeXmacs could be made more friendly. The TeXmacs web site has the following description:

“GNU TeXmacs is a free scientific editing platform designed to create beautiful technical documents using a wysiwyg interface.”

A more friendly way to say this would be:

“TeXmacs is a WYSIWYG word processor that is particularly good for documents containing math.”

or even

“TeXmacs is a WYSIWYG word processor that is better than Microsoft Word for documents containing math.”

What do you think?

#2

I think that one of the goal of @darcy’s customization Xmacs is to be more user friendly (especially to non-scientists).

#3

I think it is a good idea (at least worth discussing :slight_smile: ) to write a presentation of the software aimed at younger students.
For a start, one could publish it in the TeXmacs blog. If you write a draft I am going to collaborate to refine it.

#4

@amichail There is already a setting Details in menus in Edit->Preferences. This removes some of the menus and toolbar items. You could use this as a start to implement your idea. You could remove some of the maths that are unlikely to be used in a high school setting (⊕, ↬, ⋙, …).