I tend to use TeXmacs for this. It’s a WYSIWYG document editor; you can enter mathematics using (La)TeX syntax, but there are also menus and keyboard shortcuts. It’s free in both senses. No symbolic-manipulation capabilities of its own, but it has some ability to connect to other things that do; I haven’t tried those out.
Mathematica isn’t that far from what you want, I think, and it has the advantage of being able to do a lot of the symbolic manipulation for you. But, as you say, it’s really expensive—though if you haven’t checked out the home and (if applicable) student editions, you should do so; they’re much cheaper. Anyway, the fact that to me it sounds close to what you want makes me suspect that I’m missing or misunderstanding some of your requirements; if you could clarify how it doesn’t meet your needs it may help with suggesting other options.
Excellent! I will mention that I have occasionally had it crash on me (this was in the past, probably an older version of the software, so take it with a grain of salt—but you might want to be slightly more paranoid about saving your work regularly than you would be with, say, a simple text editor).
Been using it for an hour now,and yes, it’s crashed on me once, but no more than half the other programs I use. Already seeing the benefits of it when I spent half an hour doing something, realised there was a mistake at the start, and could then just find/replace stuff instead of scrunching the paper up into a ball and cursing Pierre Laplace. Also I don’t have to deal with the aesthetic trauma of viewing my own handwriting. Outstanding.
I tend to use TeXmacs for this. It’s a WYSIWYG document editor; you can enter mathematics using (La)TeX syntax, but there are also menus and keyboard shortcuts. It’s free in both senses. No symbolic-manipulation capabilities of its own, but it has some ability to connect to other things that do; I haven’t tried those out.
Mathematica isn’t that far from what you want, I think, and it has the advantage of being able to do a lot of the symbolic manipulation for you. But, as you say, it’s really expensive—though if you haven’t checked out the home and (if applicable) student editions, you should do so; they’re much cheaper. Anyway, the fact that to me it sounds close to what you want makes me suspect that I’m missing or misunderstanding some of your requirements; if you could clarify how it doesn’t meet your needs it may help with suggesting other options.
YES. Thank you so much. Texmacs seems to be exactly what I wanted.
Excellent! I will mention that I have occasionally had it crash on me (this was in the past, probably an older version of the software, so take it with a grain of salt—but you might want to be slightly more paranoid about saving your work regularly than you would be with, say, a simple text editor).
Been using it for an hour now,and yes, it’s crashed on me once, but no more than half the other programs I use. Already seeing the benefits of it when I spent half an hour doing something, realised there was a mistake at the start, and could then just find/replace stuff instead of scrunching the paper up into a ball and cursing Pierre Laplace. Also I don’t have to deal with the aesthetic trauma of viewing my own handwriting. Outstanding.