My niece needed calculus software, and in the process of messing with xmaxima I learned about texmacs (and embedding maxima in it). Good lord. What an amazing piece of software. It's actually an amazing general purpose word processor. It's the first time I've been able to stomach Emacs-like or Tex-like things because it's not horribly precious or mind-numbingly ugly on screen. This should be the default word processor for Debian. Wow.