TeXmacs

Raised as a usability problem by 14 people on Hacker News over 10 years (2016–2025), in 9 threads.

People raised many different problems with TeXmacs, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 15 complaints

Symbols and diacritics appear as bespoke ASCII codes when the file is opened as text2025-09-27
UI is hard to navigate and feels clunky to use2025-03-28
Tables need manual column resizing and output is lower quality than LaTeX2022-07-23
Hard to figure out how to use macros and customize layout2022-04-06
Error messages are unintuitive, so users can't tell what went wrong when compilation fails2020-11-05
Defining a macro needs a separate mouse hunt-and-click to insert each argument2020-05-06
Mailing list archive search only covers one month, and multi-month search is non-obvious2020-04-19
Early interface was clumsy, unresponsive, and many things were unintuitive2020-04-16
Interface is unintuitive and takes time to get used to2020-04-16
Keyboard latency makes typing too slow for fast touch typists2019-07-02
Clicking a lower video changes a video far up the page, so nothing seems to happen2019-06-30
Feels clumsy for users forcing a previous ASCII/LaTeX workflow onto it2019-06-29
Editor feels slow and clunky to use compared to writing LaTeX directly2019-06-29
Finding commands in toolbars and menus is obtuse; shortcuts are hard to discover2016-02-15
Emacs-style keybindings and buffer layout are very confusing to users unfamiliar with them2016-02-15