Did TeXmacs' doubly misleading name hold it back for 20 years?

Wow, yep. I’d heard of it, and due to the name I never even bothered to look at it til seeing this post. Looks like amazing software.

The name doesn't help, but while it may produce output out of the box that looks as good as LaTeX, the website also doesn't directly answer another question which matters to people who need to do typesetting things with it that have been solved by others: the huge package ecosystem of LaTeX (and the batteries-included distributions like TeX Live).

I honestly thought the “Mac” was a reference to Apple computers and thought it was a Mac-only application.

To be more specific, I thought it was a Mac utility for creating formulas in latex.

It's really hard to say.

Producing documents for publication is a big part of the reason for using software like TeX, both because of its capabilities and requirements of the publisher. Given the audience of TeXmacs appears similar to that of TeX, in terms of capabilities but not the requirements of publishers, it was not terribly appealing to a wide audience and a significant factor holding it back for its specialized audience.

That said, the name did encourage me to at least look at it back in my university days (a very long time ago). When I found that it was not a front-end for TeX, I simply moved on.

Yes.

One could argue that it is held back by not being based on TeX (depends on how good the export is) and emacs (probably).

I prefer using TeXstudio as a TeX editor. Naturally, I thought that TeXmacs is the pendant in Emacs.

Up to this point it did not occur to me that TeXmacs is _not_ using TeX at all.

I guess that I am not alone with that thought. Does it use Emacs, then?

If this is a problem, no one told Javascript

When I used to use TeXmacs I would have annoying glitches to the point where I just called back to TeX with regular Emacs. I think its general clunkyness really held it back. The problem now is that people still use regular Emacs and share the TeX file locally or use a service like overleaf that allows for collaboration online. TeXmacs in my opinion tried to solve a problem for a small subset of users that it didn't really catch on.

That is a good point. Maybe... I know I didn't look at it because I thought it was an emacs fork like XEmacs.

> not based on TeX nor emacs

i'd could also see the name implying connection to Mexican food or Macintosh computers.

I think I need to give it a second try now that I read the comments.

I usually work with TexWorks or texstudio.

Things that are great usually come through anyway. Is that too optimistic? If you think Texmacs is great, maybe it also has come over a threshold to greatness - it wasn't there for all of the past 20 years(?) Things such as your outreach in this post is what's needed for a great program to become more well known.

My spontaneous feeling is that it's very upsetting that it has TeX in the name but does not use Tex or Latex.

I definitely saw the "macs" bit and never gave it a second thought.

how do you mean 'held back'? do you think quality wise? i think its entirely possible that the developers dont care if its popular or not. they know its great and dont feel the need to market it too much

Yes. I always thought it was a mode for emacs.