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tombertlast Wednesday at 11:51 PM0 repliesview on HN

I have never really used the web thing personally. I always use the command line version, and it works perfectly fine and it's FOSS.

I find the syntax to Typst to be generally better than LaTeX. I don't like its equations as much, but Typst has one huge advantage that makes it easier to forgive its faults: it compiles several orders of magnitude faster than LaTeX. This might not sound like much but it honestly sort of changes how you even think about problems. I keep Neovim open on the left, run `typst watch` in the background, and Evince on the right, and my updates show up immediately upon saving.

Also, adding plugins and libraries is trivial. All you have to do is declare it at the top of the file and it will automatically fetch it, which is considerably easier than LaTeX.

I don't like the default font it ships with, but it's easy enough to add a Latin Modern font and get something that looks like LaTeX.

Before Typst, I had typically been using Pandoc with Markdown to write my documents, and that served me well for quite awhile, but it had the disadvantage of being extremely slow to compile. A slide deck that I gave last year [1] would take a bit more than a minute to compile. This became an issue because I had to make a few small last-minute changes and having to wait an entire minute to view them actually made it so I was really pushing against the wire.

If I had done my slides in Typst, they would have compiled in about 40 milliseconds, they wouldn't have looked any worse, and I'd have a syntax not dissimilar to Markdown. I'm pretty much a convert at this point.

[1] https://git.sr.ht/~tombert/lambda_days_2025