About

Manifold exists because writing mathematics well usually means choosing between fighting LaTeX by hand and using an editor that hides it and gets the details wrong.

The right idea is an old one: you write what a thing is — a section, a theorem, a formula — and let the typesetting follow. The tools built on that idea look like 2003, and they treat right-to-left text as something to be survived. Meanwhile the editors that look modern treat mathematics as an add-on and mixed-direction text as somebody else's problem.

So this is an attempt at all of it at once: structure you write rather than fake, an interface that is quiet and quick, and Hebrew, English and mathematics living together in one paragraph without a single switch to set.

Who it is for

Anyone writing mathematics who would rather think about the mathematics. It was built by a student writing course notes and problem sets in two languages, which is why bidirectional text is not a feature here but a starting condition.

How it is built

A desktop application: Rust for the parts that touch the machine, and a modern web stack for the editor itself — which is also why the whole of it runs in a browser as well. Mathematics is rendered live as you type, in a formula editor written for this program rather than borrowed. Where the program had a choice between guessing and measuring, it measured: its behavior around selection, page breaks, model quality and page geometry all came from driving the real thing and reading the results.

What it promises

• Your document is yours. One self-contained file on your disk. No account, no cloud, nothing to sign up for.
• Nothing leaves your machine unless you ask. Spelling and grammar are checked locally. The assistant is off by default, and the one setting that sends text elsewhere says so plainly.
• It says what it cannot do. Where a feature would need to guess — Hebrew grammar, a model's opinion about a theorem — it declines rather than pretending.

Where it is

In development and in daily use by its author, with builds for macOS, Windows and Linux on the front page and a version that runs in a browser. Being worked on: numbering and cross-references across a notebook of documents, and signing the builds so the first launch needs no extra step.

Manifold is free software under the GNU General Public License, version 3 or later. The complete source of every release is attached to it, on the downloads above.