25 years ago I hoped we would extend Emacs to do WYSIWG word processing
With inline LaTeX previews, we're already  surprisingly close. In fact, I'd say that going all the way would be almost a step back. WYSIWYG is ultimately not an ideal editing paradigm: it wins in the short term, being easy to learn, but drags you down in the long term.<p>I've recently started using Quora a bit more. Unlike StackOverflow, they use a WYSIWYG editor. I've found this significantly less convenient than StackOverflow's markdown. Similarly, switching from Word to LaTeX was an  improvement for most tasks once I got used to it.<p>Unfortunately, LaTeX has a bunch of its own shortcomings not related to it's non-WYSIWYG nature. For common tasks, I think going from markdown to LaTeX is ideal. Markdown itself is far from perfect, but it's the best compromise I've found especially with Pandoc's extensions.<p>So here's my idea for a great emacs-based document editor: markdown with inline math previews coupled with a full live preview to the side. All the necessary modes for this already exist (like whizzy TeX and AucTeX's previews), so it should be much easier to put together than a full WYSIWYG editor. More productive, too.