Introducing lq — a CLI for LyX

Shifu Jiang <[email protected]> Sun, 24 May 2026 16:53:10 +0800
Newsgroups gmane.editors.lyx.devel
Message-ID <CAGVjYfkmMKKKZDp38+xPdYRSCg_U3MAre96NAnLwPSdFRvMBqg@mail.gmail.com>
Dear LyX developers,

I have been using LyX for academic writing for over a decade. I often wish
I could get some help from AI in LyX so that I wouldn't spend all day
polishing just a few paragraphs while not enjoying it at all.
Recently, I built a CLI tool called *lq* to enable AI agents to edit .lyx
files safely and easily. You can find it in this Github repo
<https://github.com/naivej/lq>.
I don't lack coding experience but admittedly I'm not a software engineer.
So this tool is heavily "vibe coded". However, I did my best to stay
involved in critical design decisions and ensure the code was of a high
quality. It turned out to be a really enjoyable process, and I learnt a lot.

I'm writing to you to introduce lq, as I believe it could benefit many
people in the LyX community. Obviously I don't want to waste your time
with some AI-generated crap. This tool has been battle-tested and has
proven useful to me (or rather, to the AI agent that uses it)
If you like lq, I would love to hear your feedback. I would also be
grateful if you could list it on the LyX website
<https://www.lyx.org/AdditionalSoftware#toc5>.
If I may, there are a few LyX features on my wish list that could really
benefit lq:
1. I use lfun buffer-switch to ensure that lq-generated edits are reloaded
into the correct target file, rather than the one that users are working on
in the GUI. This however does not work on Windows, because LyXServer uses a
named pipe protocol that delimits messages with :, which conflicts with the
drive letter in Windows absolute paths (e.g. C:\...). Ideally, we would be
able to get rid of this restriction.
2. Currently, it can be difficult to pinpoint an exact location in an open
.lyx file. If would be great if we could have an lfun detects the cursor
location or selected text.

Thank you for building LyX.

Best,
Shifu

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