LyX [LWN.net]

LyX

Posted Jun 4, 2025 16:24 UTC (Wed) by joib (subscriber, #8541)
Parent article: The importance of free software to science

One for some reason relatively little known application is LyX, which is a kind-of-semi WYSIWYG editor for LaTeX. In particular, it has a very good equation editor. I largely wrote my PhD thesis with it (including the journal articles). And the LaTeX it generates is fairly readable, so if there's some final tweaking you need to do that LyX doesn't support natively, you can drop down to LaTeX to do that stuff before submitting.

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LyX

Posted Jun 6, 2025 18:38 UTC (Fri) by parametricpoly (subscriber, #143903) [Link] (3 responses)

Unfortunately LyX is pretty crash prone, probably due to the fact that it was written in C++, which makes it horribly difficult to write non-crashing code. I've contributed to the project and used it for over 10 years. Unfortunately the last time I suggested a colleague using Windows to try it out, it crashed multiple times during the first 15 minutes. It has been quite stable on my Lnux, but typically crashes 1-2 times per day.

LyX

Posted Jun 6, 2025 20:05 UTC (Fri) by joib (subscriber, #8541) [Link] (1 responses)

That's too bad. I used LyX roughly from the late 90ies to the early 2010s, and I didn't have any issues with crashing (not saying it never crashed, but I don't remember it to be any worse than other complex gui applications like say Firefox). Maybe quality has gone down since then, if so too bad, I really liked it.

LyX

Posted Jun 6, 2025 22:05 UTC (Fri) by sfeam (subscriber, #2841) [Link]

I have used, and continue to use, LyX when writing papers for publication [biochemistry/computational biology]. I have never had a problem with it crashing. The biggest problem has been deciding "is it worth the time to write a LyX template to match the LaTeX template this journal will accept for submission?". It has been a pleasant surprise going back 20 years or so how many biology journals are willing to accept submissions in LaTeX, even though it may require bypassing the default final-stage submission process and corresponding directly with the print office rather than the editorial office.

Monkey testing LyX

Posted Jun 7, 2025 17:37 UTC (Sat) by gmatht (subscriber, #58961) [Link]

Heh, I have submitted 244 bug reports to LyX. Most of these are crash/aborts found by my Jankey monkey testing tool. Unfortunately, they couldn't fix bugs as quickly as I could find them. I bisected the crashes to find the regressing commit, but working on Coverity reports (as they do now) looks like it would be more developer time effective.

I also imagine LyX would be more reliable if you use the last release of the previous version. (i.e. 2.3.8 rather than the latest 2.4.3).