On Sat, 06 Feb 2010 13:51:31 -0500, Dave McGuire wrote:
Lyx is pretty nice but those
types of front-ends usually just get in the way.
You can do whatever latex wizardry you like and even plain tex in lyx.
These portions just won't be interpreted on the fly and render verbatim
on the screen. In addition, most latex commands are known to lyx. So you
can type "\mu" and get a nice character  on the screen. This is one of
the rare cases where you can get both: A visual intuitive GUI plus the
full power of machine code.
This is not just blue sky talk, but from experience. I learned latex the
hard way -- vi on a unix server to typeset the hand written notes of a
mathematics professor. Yet, for my thesis I switched to lyx. The online
graphical representation simply avoids a host of common errors. It makes
navigation in the document so much simpler.