[0]: https://coffeescript.org/

Blood. That's blood.

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.

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

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.

See https://github.com/typst/typst for the CLI version

There is a page with pre-compiled binaries as well and on Macs, you can install using homebrew.

What the core lacks is the web service that offers e.g. collaborative editing.

Or install it using vscode's extensions, or install it for neovim using mason. That's a few commonly used distribution paths.

I like the author's note about the license: "As we do not believe in imaginary property, this package belongs to the public domain."

I think it's much more common to see a Creative Commons license on this sort of thing.