I must be weird, but I liked the pre-1.4 lyx better than the later revisions. Sometime between 1.4.x and 2.0 the previously functional keyboard shortcuts stopped working, and at the same time the same functions became available from menus and toolbar.
But oh my, did their graphical equation editor save me from a lot of headaches at university. I could produce a clean and printable version of absolutely anything, as long as I remembered to set the math mode blocks to be larger than the surrounding text segments.
Fluid keyboard-only editing of typeset equations is Lyx's most valuable feature to me. I'm sure Lyx was inspired by some prior art, but I haven't come across another app that allows me to write up lecture notes from a blackboard with the speed of a stenographer.
I would love to see a web app that aims for the same thing.
The keyboard shortcuts are completely editable if you go into the various .bind files (When similar things happened to me in the past, I made a couple of quick fixes to those and got keyboard shortcuts working beautifully again).
i'm glad to see continued development on LyX - i started with TeXnicCenter, then moved to LyX, and now on TeXworks (primarily for speed), but without LyX i probably would have abandoned Latex. LyX makes a steep learning curve so much simpler - in some sense the pitfalls and lack of features makes it easier to move outside the IDE and become more comfortable with Tex in general. You copy and paste your lyx code to something like TeXworks, and edit small pieces to get the desired effect not achievable in LyX.
LyX is not the sexiest app out there, but it's an indispensable tool for me: rock solid, feature-filled, and easy to use - a great example of open source done right.
I really liked LyX when I used it back in school for my proof-based class's homework. I even used it for my resume - which I have to say came out looking very neat and professional for not a ton of work!
I don't have much of a reason to use it anymore, but I really appreciated this software. Even though it would occasionally crash on my admittedly unstable laptop Linux install (never tried it on windows)... I guess you could use Emacs or hobble through using a gui in MS word or something (actually there probably are some alternatives, I just never looked into them), but if you do a lot of LaTeX/text work you might want to look into LyX.
Saw this HN story yesterday, tried LyX today, and am already fairly comfortable using it for a take-home math quiz. The steepest part of the learning curve was figuring out how to do multiline formulas. Really impressive for a program like this. I will have to look closely at the keyboard shortcuts, though.
Enhanced support for LaTeX options:
"It is now possible to specify custom delimiters (e.g. for beamer's <overlay> options)."
Layout enhancements:
"The beamer layout has undergone a major revision. Some long-standing drawbacks were removed, and some important beamer-specific features (such as overlay options) are now supported natively. Contributed by Jürgen Spitzmüller."
But oh my, did their graphical equation editor save me from a lot of headaches at university. I could produce a clean and printable version of absolutely anything, as long as I remembered to set the math mode blocks to be larger than the surrounding text segments.