I'm quite glad some alternatives are popping up. Using LaTeX feels like piece of 80s tech to be honest. It is obviously fine and super powerful, but, like vim-style fine. There got to be more contemporary alternatives that status quo.
Not everyone is into nostalgia. I don't try to take away LaTeX or vim from anyone, it just not for everyone.
These are some notes I wrote when I started out with typst when comparing with LaTeX:
1. It doesn't generate 5 bloody files when compiling.
2. Compiling is instant.
3. Diagnostics are way easier to understand (sort of like Rust compiler suggestion style).
4. List items can be either - item1 - item2, etc. or [item1], [item2]. The latter is way better because you can use anchoring to match on the braces (like "%" in vim), which means navigating long item entries is much easier.
5. In latex you have the \document{...} where you can't specify macros so they need to be at the top, in Typst you can specify the macros close to where you need them.
6. It's easier to version control and diff, especially if you use semantic line breaks.
7. Changing page layout, margins, spacing between things, etc., footers with page counters, etc. just seems way easier to do.
> 5. In latex you have the \document{...} where you can't specify macros so they need to be at the top, in Typst you can specify the macros close to where you need them.
You can define macros anywhere in a LaTeX document; it's packages that need to be loaded before \begin{document}.
> 6. It's easier to version control and diff, especially if you use semantic line breaks.
TeX mostly ignores whitespace, so semantic line breaks and version control should work equally well with both LaTeX and Typst.
(I agree with all your other points though)
I think what the GP means is that whitespace is often not ignored by LaTeX, so line breaks can cause extra wide spaces between words. It's common to comment out the line break in LaTeX for this reason. This is much less of an issue in Typst (if at all) due to the separation of code and content.
https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/7453/what-is-the-use...
It's not even fine. It's old and it shows also in the functionality, and I say this as a rather heavy LaTeX user. For example, Unicode support is atrocious. A few years ago I had to include some Hebrew and Russian words in a document that was otherwise in Latin alphabet, and it was hell.
I'm not a vim user but my understanding is that it has native Unicode support. Software with old-school UI but adapted to current needs (or where needs just didn't change) is fine, but it's not the case of LaTeX.
XeTeX handles Unicode fine, but that's definitely one area where TeX shows its age and its extensibility didn't, I think, allow Lamport to make a real difference.
I have heard about it, but it isn't viable for me to switch to it because most academic journals and conferences have templates incompatible with XeTeX, or directly ask for the sources and compile them with pdflatex.
This is the same reason why it isn't viable for me to switch to typst either, by the way. I hope it gains popularity and ends up as a standard displacing (or along with) pdflatex.
I appreciate your postscript. I don't use TeX or vim out of nostalgia; I didn't discover TeX until I was a senior in undergrad, and I think I didn't discover vim until after I finished my Ph.D. I use vim because it seems best for its tasks, given the way I think (though maybe I think that way because I'm old). I use TeX because I write math for a living and have invested a huge amount of time using it, so that it's become intuitive to me even though I know it wouldn't be for a newcomer, and I can't be bothered to break long-established habits until I know an alternative will be established everywhere TeX is.
Well yeah but the point is that unlike other pieces of 70s tech, LaTeX has no suitable alternative in its class (at least until now :p), meaning a FOSS software to produce high quality typesetting with an emphasis on maths.