Typst Is Quietly Eating LaTeX. The Real Lesson Is Plain Text.

Typst was the second fastest-growing programming language on GitHub in 2025, up more than 108% year over year, behind only Luau.¹ It is a typesetting system most people have never heard of. Its real lesson is not the syntax. It is what Typst quietly proves: your document is most durable when it is plain text you own.

GitHub describes Typst plainly. "As a modern LaTeX alternative, Typst aims to make academic and technical publishing faster, less cryptic, and more collaborative."¹ It passed 50,000 stars and gathered more than 400 contributors on a project that started in 2019.² But the number to watch is the trajectory, not the total — and the trajectory is steep.

The trajectory is what makes this a trend and not a footnote. A total-stars figure flatters every project that has ever existed; it only goes up. Growth rate is the honest signal, and Typst's growth rate put it second on GitHub's 2025 list of fastest-growing languages by percentage.¹

An independent reading of the curve agrees. When LWN reviewed Typst in September 2025, the project showed 365 contributors;³ today it shows more than 400.² The line is still climbing, not coasting on an old spike.

What most people believe about documents

Most people believe a document is whatever the app saves. You write in a word processor, you press save, and a file appears with a familiar icon. The thinking stops there. The document feels real because the icon is real, and the icon opens when you double-click it. That has long been the whole contract.

It is an understandable belief. The interface is the document, the document is the file, and the file is yours. Nothing in the daily experience of writing suggests otherwise. The trouble only surfaces years later — when the app is gone, the format has moved on, or the subscription lapses, and the icon no longer opens.

Why the binary you rent fails

The flaw is structural. A .docx, a Notion page, or a proprietary cloud document is a binary container or a database row — not text you can read with your own eyes. You cannot grep it. You cannot diff two versions to see what changed. You cannot open it in twenty years without the exact software that wrote it.

This is the difference between owning and renting. When your source is locked inside an app's format, the app is a landlord with the only key. Export usually exists, but it is a translation, and translations lose things — the footnotes shift, the equations break, the layout drifts. The document you get back is a photograph of the one you wrote, not the original.

The cost is invisible until the day it is not. A pricing change, a shutdown, an acquisition, or a format that the next version no longer reads — any of these can strand work you assumed was safe. The people who feel it most are the ones with the longest archives: the thesis from a decade ago, the manuscript that outlived three editors. Plain text is the insurance you take out before you know you need it.

What the Typst surge actually demonstrates

What Typst demonstrates is that a plain-text source can match the gold standard and still be a file you control. LWN said it produces results "comparable to the gold standard, LaTeX, with a simpler markup system and easier customization."³ The output is a polished PDF. The source is a .typ file you can read in any editor.

That separation is the whole point, and it predates the hype. Typst's co-creator Laurenz Mädje argued it in his 2022 master's thesis at TU Berlin: by separating content from presentation, markup languages "are more automatable and flexible than their visual (Wysiwyg) counterparts."⁴ A plain-text source is something a script can transform, a version-control system can track, and a human can still read raw.

Mädje describes the design as one that "mixes plain text, lightweight markup, and a complete programming language into a single consistent syntax."⁵ The compiler is fast enough that LWN noted "a responsive live preview, even of large documents, due to Typst's speed and incremental compilation."³ You get the immediacy of a word processor on top of a source you fully own.

That combination is what was hard to believe before Typst made it ordinary. For years the trade looked fixed: a comfortable WYSIWYG editor whose file you did not really control, or a plain-text source you owned but had to fight. Typst's adoption curve is a quiet vote that the trade was never necessary. Convenience and ownership can sit in the same file — and once you see that, the binary you rent starts to look like a habit, not a requirement.

The advantage is plain text, not Typst

Here is the honest part. The durable advantage is not unique to Typst — it belongs to any plain-text markup system. LaTeX's .tex files are also greppable and diffable. Markdown notes are too. AsciiDoc, reStructuredText, the same. Typst is the vivid current example because it is rising fast, but the property it shows off is the property of plain text itself.

This is why the lesson generalizes past typesetting. A thesis in Typst and a note in Markdown win for the same architectural reason: the source is text, so the source survives. The format is the durable asset. The tool that edits it is a convenience that can be swapped, lost, or outlived — and the writing carries on regardless.

The limits, stated honestly

Lead with the limit, because it is real. LaTeX still wins where academics need it most. LWN named the barrier: "Almost no journals that provide LaTeX templates for submissions offer a Typst option, so physicists and mathematicians adopting Typst will need to find a way to convert their manuscripts."³

If your venue requires LaTeX, momentum will not move your deadline. LaTeX also carries decades of ecosystem maturity — packages, templates, citation styles, and community answers for every edge case. Typst is free software, Apache-2.0 licensed, and written in Rust,³ and its development is active: version 0.15.0 shipped on June 15, 2026.⁶ But "rising fast" is not "arrived." In 2026, LaTeX remains the safer bet for journal acceptance, and that is the fair reading.

None of this dents the spine. The argument was never "switch to Typst." It is that whatever you write in, the file underneath should be plain text you can read without the tool.

What to do tomorrow

You do not have to abandon your tools to act on this. You have to change what you treat as the asset — the file, not the app. The app is the part that changes, breaks, or disappears; the plain-text file is the part you keep. Three concrete moves make the shift real:

• Pick a plain-text source format for anything you want to keep. Markdown for notes, LaTeX or Typst for documents, plain .txt for the rest. If you can read it in a text editor, you own it.
• Put it under version control, or at least keep dated copies. A diffable history is something a binary format cannot give you.
• Test the exit before you need it. Open your most important document outside the app that made it. If it comes out broken, that is the lock-in you will feel later, found early.

Frequently asked questions

What is Typst?

Typst is an open-source typesetting system and markup language, positioned by GitHub as "a modern LaTeX alternative" that "aims to make academic and technical publishing faster, less cryptic, and more collaborative."¹ You write in a plain-text .typ file and compile it to a polished PDF. It is free software, Apache-2.0 licensed, and written in Rust.³

Is Typst better than LaTeX?

It depends on what you need. LWN found Typst's output "comparable to the gold standard, LaTeX," with simpler markup and faster compilation.³ But LaTeX still wins on journal acceptance and ecosystem maturity in 2026 — almost no journals offer a Typst submission option yet.³ For drafting and personal documents, Typst's speed is a genuine edge; for formal submission, check your venue first.

Is Typst worth switching to?

The honest answer is that it depends on whether your venue accepts it.³ If you submit to journals that require LaTeX, switching costs you a conversion step. But the deeper point holds either way: because both produce a plain-text source you own, neither choice locks you in. The file outlives the decision.

Can I use Typst for academic papers?

You can write them, but publishing is the catch. As LWN notes, "almost no journals that provide LaTeX templates for submissions offer a Typst option," so authors "will need to find a way to convert their manuscripts."³ Conversion tools like Pandoc help bridge the gap, but in 2026 LaTeX remains the path of least resistance for formal academic submission.

Why use plain text for documents at all?

Because plain text is greppable, diffable, version-controllable, and readable without the original app. A binary or cloud document depends on the software that made it; a plain-text source depends only on your ability to read. As Mädje put it, separating content from presentation makes a document "more automatable and flexible" than its WYSIWYG counterpart.⁴

How fast is Typst compared to LaTeX?

LWN attributed Typst's standout feature to its engine: "a responsive live preview, even of large documents, due to Typst's speed and incremental compilation."³ In practice that means the preview updates as you type rather than after a slow rebuild. LaTeX, lacking incremental compilation, is noticeably slower to recompile large documents.

Does this only apply to typesetting?

No. The plain-text advantage applies to anything you write — notes, drafts, journals, code, configuration. A thesis in Typst and a note in Markdown win for the same reason: the source is text you can read, transform, and keep. Typst is simply the most visible current proof of a principle that is decades old.

The lesson of Typst is not that you should adopt it. It is that the durable part of any document was never the app — it was always the plain text underneath, which is true whether you are typesetting a thesis or keeping a note in plain Markdown on your own device, the way MNMNOTE does.

This argument owes a debt to Steph Ango, who states the principle better than anyone: "File over app is a philosophy: if you want to create digital artifacts that last, they must be files you can control, in formats that are easy to retrieve and read."⁷

If that resonates, mnmnote.com keeps your notes as plain text on your own device — the file is yours, with or without the app.

References

Further reading from MNMNOTE: on plain text as the format AI can already read, Your Notes Are Already AI-Ready; on the legal right to take your data with you, Your Notes Now Have a Legal Right to Leave; on where plain text quietly stops being portable, Markdown Is Portable Until You Add an Image; and on structured plain text you own, Your Notes Can Be a Database Without a Silo.