Significant progress has been made in the world of WYSISYG (what you see is what you get) for TeX /LaTeX .
Commercial implementations of TeX exist which have a "real-time viewer" which shows the result of your TeX input/source as you type it in a DVI-viewer window by compiling your input on-the-fly.
MiKTeX comes with TeXnicCenter, an integrated development environment (IDE) for developing LaTeX-documents on Microsoft Windows.
This site has a comprehensive list of other TeX Shells/IDEs.
Better yet, LyX offers a full graphical front-end to TeX
and LaTeX
.
I quote from the LyX home page,
www.lyx.org:
LyX is an advanced open source document processor running on many Unix
platforms (including Mac OS X), OS/2, and on
Windows/Cygwin. Unlike standard
word processors, LyX encourages an approach to writing based on the structure
of your documents, not their appearance. LyX lets you concentrate on writing,
leaving details of visual layout to the software. LyX produces high quality,
professional output --- using LaTeX
, an industrial strength typesetting
engine, in the background; LyX is far more than a front-end to LaTeX
,
however. No knowledge of LaTeX
is necessary to use LyX, although it will
give a user more power.
LyX is stable and fully featured. It has been used for documents as
large as a thesis, or as small as a business letter. Despite its simple GUI
interface (available in many languages), it supports tables, figures, and
hyperlinked cross-references, and has a best-of-breed math editor.
There exists a version of LyX which runs within the KDE environment, KLyX, though development of this seems to have stalled.
GNU TeXmacs, www.texmacs.org, is a free scientific text editor, which was both inspired by TeX and GNU Emacs. The editor allows you to write structured documents via a WYSIWYG and user-friendly interface. New styles may be created by the user.
TeXmacs is also suitable as an interface for computer algebra systems.
TeXmacs supports the Guile/Scheme extension language, so that you may customize the interface and write your own extensions to the editor.
Kile is an integrated LaTeX environment for the KDE environment.