LaTeX is not a text editor: It’s a typesetting language. It’s basically HTML + math + academia trauma. (Normie confusion is justified.)

It’s a programming language for documents. If you just want to write text, it’s absolutely the wrong tool. LiGNUts often recommend it because they conflate “editing text” with “producing documents.” -It’s like how they think Libre Office is a drop-in replacement for Office, or GIMP is a professional grade raster image editor.

LaTeX actually is

• A markup language (like HTML)
• You write plain text with commands like \section{}, \begin{itemize}, \textbf{}
• Then you compile it into a PDF
• It’s used for:
  • Academic papers
  • Math-heavy documents
  • Scientific journals
  • Theses
  • Anything requiring precise layout

It is not used for:

• Notes
• Normal writing
• Editing text files
• Anything casual
• Anything you want to finish quickly

Linux culture: “Text editing” = “editing plain text files that eventually become something else.”

So, they apparently think Markdown is HTML, and LaTeX is PDF. (Can we please stop calling them nerds or geeks?)

LaTeX gets recommended because it’s ‘pure text’, ‘powerful’, ‘open source’, and ‘better than Word’ for people who haven’t used Word in decades.

But for normies, LaTeX is verbose, cryptic, full of weird syntax, dependent on packages, and prone to compiler errors.

To use it, the normie need to learn a bunch of new stuff including the LaTeX language, document class system, compiler, error logs, etc.

Better tools:

• VS Code
• Kate
• Gedit
• Sublime Text
• Notepad++ (via Wine)
• Obsidian

LaTeX is for publishing, not editing.