The term Lyx uses for what it does is WYSIWM (What You See Is What You Mean) to describe the fact the GUI lets users manipulate the structure of the document.
The thing I love most about LyX is the "outline" view. Editing plain text e.g. in "vi" has nothing comparable, but neither does Word, or Google Docs, etc., in my opinion.
In the screenshot here https://pauljmiller.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/lyx-main-scr... you can see there is a pane on the left with the document structure. At the bottom of that pane, there are four buttons, the right of which are an up and down button. Those four buttons (left, right, up, down) allow you to take a section of the document and move it around. The up/down change its position relative to other sections, and left/right promote/indent the section (e.g. change heading to sub-heading, or vice versa).
When editing large documents (e.g. > 100 pages), I find this invaluable if I wish to restructure the document.
Hybrids like this are a nice advance over WYSIWYG imo. There's similar, partial live preview functionality in LyX and Emacs' Org mode as well, and I love those.
This is really cool. Your presentation source is a plain text file, very similar to markdown or restructured text. The presenter window monitors the text file, so you see changes live as you edit. The resulting presentation is very nice.
Just a couple of feedback and a suggestion for a feature
1. when editing a document, the left arrow works as opposite as one would expect: instead of sending the editing fullscreen, it brings the toolbar in foreground. In this case I would put a right arrow.
2. I would put the graphics/table menu together with the paragraph/heading/list
As a LaTeX user (and as a editor of many BS/MS thesis of non-technical friends) I have always thought that defining the structure of a long document before starting to write was fundamental. Therefore I would love a WYSIWYG editor that forces (or at least guides) users to define the structure of the document before and in a different place than where they write the content.
I'm not sure I agree with the parent, but to give an example for a non-rectangular UI for manipulating (programming) text:
Combine structural editing[1] overlaid on some kind of 3d graph that shows how your entire codebase fits together.
A neat aspect of this is that you can also use it to edit webpages based on the current structure in a WYSIWYG fashion. Just go to some page (Hacker News, Facebook, etc.), press Command-A, Command-C, open this URL into a new tab, and press Command-V.
I tried the GUI tools. But what I love about the web interface is the ability to CTRL + F anything on the page. And I can also "copy" any text I want in it.
That’s a good point—the software provides new types of UI, too! I had been thinking about rearranging text and org-capture, but you’re right that another excellent feature is the ability to view and interact with text fluidly and easily
But that means hidden state. If I quote somebody, I can see how they produced their markup in BBcode, but in WYSIWYG I can't see which icon button to press.
> The term "greeking" was applied by various WYSIWYG editors of the 1980s, such as ApplixWare and Island Graphics. Greeking referred to the substitution of text with a placeholder gray bar upon moving out of focus.
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