The compiler is open-source and can be run locally. You need an account if you want to use their web editor, which is nice (it shows error messages where they occur along with an explanation and link to docs, and also shows a real-time updated preview).
As for Latex vs Typst, as a language Typst is much better, compiles very quickly, and has sane error messages. However, Typst still has a few rough edges, and can't do everything you can with Latex + packages (yet).
I've been using Typst for most of my documents for a few months and I've been generally happy with it.
There is a very prominent web site that offers a hosted version without much clarity about the fact that you can run it yourself. The hosted version offers collaborative editing similar to what Overleaf provides which is incredibly useful.
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.
Typst is an application you can use on your local machine without any signup. The compiler is hosted on GitHub. The Typst web app (the online editor at typst.app) is closed source and offered as a paid with cloud storage, collaboration, autocomplete, etc...
On battery life: what is decent for you? I wonder, because the T14S that many are vouching for here gives me around 1.5h which is not the best, but I probably will be in the market for an X1 next year, so I wonder what to expect.
Very well said! In this struggle, and as I'm in a new job, and I've tried to not get carried away by the common distractions in not logging in on the corporate laptop on hn, reddit, and a few others. As you can see I already failed, but what a great thought that I could not resist to agree with a longer comment saying the same that an upvote. :)
I still depend heavily on textfx npp plugins for many mundane tasks, such as quickly sorting a few lines in a text file and I have not bothered to find a replacement so far, like in almost 2 decades hehehe
My golden hallucination tests for chatgpt are identification of Simpsons season and episode based on description of some plot lines or general0 descriptions.
I had to refresh my knowledge base visiting fandom websites to review the episode selected as answer as chatgpt tendency to mix things up and provide entirely made up episodes make it hard for bar trivias (and makes me doubt myself too). The same with other tv series such as House MD and Scrubs.
In LinkedIn I also read some of their key people wrote a post with this wording for the announcement: "I americium precise bittersweet to denote – officially – that Weaveworks volition beryllium closing its doors and shutting down commercialized operations." and I almost had an stroke trying to parse it...
Wonderful! Thanks a lot for the link! Oh man, reading that end of year 1994 issue brings out a lot of memories. An IBM Thinkpad 755CD cost $7600 USD!!! and those advertisements for everything else: the design language, the words, the double entendre, those were the times.
