Zerkalo

Back in my LaTeX days (last week,) I loved working in Setzer. A beautiful, simple, responsive LaTeX workspace. TeXStudio is fun if you need an environment where everything you need exists in button form, but Setzer is wonderful if you just want everything to get out of your way and to do LaTeX.

Switching to Typst, it found something that at least looked similar to Setzer, but found it couldn't handle citation autocomplete, so dropped it immediately. The alternative was VS Codium, which is obviously wonderful, but felt like overkill, and moreover like something I wouldn't be able to hand over to a beginner. So I decided to make my own.

Zerkalo is my attempt at a Typst workplace tailored to the student experience. I named it Zerkalo (mirror) both because it provides a kind of mirrored workspace (code on one side, preview on the other), but because I was attempting to create a kind of mirrored version of Setzer (I Love You Setzer!)

Back doing my masters, I had been forced into using Word and I lost my whole MRP due to a OneDrive save and sync corruption. It was stressful. So first thing I did with Zerkalo was make sure it easily links up with your GitHub to provide easy (though not automatic) version saves. After that, I ported Gost's templating, and upgraded it to allow on-the-fly style standard changes -- if for some reason you started writing using SBL but suddenly remember this prof wanted Chicago, no sweat: just choose Chicago in the dropdown and all is well.

The program is still in early stages, but it's coming along quickly, and I'm hoping to write my first paper in it in only a couple weeks from now.