<< | Page list | >>
About the new features in LyX 2.6.
What is new in LyX 2.6?
The LyX Team
February 2026
Work on LyX 2.6 started on October 6 2025, in parallel to the final preparations of LyX 2.5.0 which was released in February 2026.
In what follows, we will introduce the new features we consider most important ourselves.
1. Support for simple LaTeX commands
It might sound odd, but until now it was not possible in LyX to define a custom inset for simple commands without mandatory arguments, e.g. \today. LyX's custom insets always had a collapsible or inline text field for at least one mandatory argument (so you could have defined \today{}). Adressing a 20 year old feature request this has now been resolved. Via the InsetLayout tag LaTeXType simplecommand such insets can now be defined. They show as simple button insets and can even have arguments (for cases like \foo[opt], in which case they also have a collapsible text field which accepts argument insets only).
2. More cowbellspecial chars
Until now, LyX only provided a hardcoded list of special characters (such as ellipsis), formatting commands (such as ligature break) and logos (such as the LyX logo).
LyX 2.6 introduces a new structured format (similar to Layout) for these special characters and moves their definition out of source into the layout files (the received special characters can now be found in the new file stdspecialchars.inc).
This means that layouts and modules can modify these char styles and add additional ones.
Furthermore, special chars can also defined for specific languages (in the file languages). This way, LyX can now natively support language-specific special characters as well as so-called (babel) shorthands. All shorthands that are supported by babel and polyglossia are now also natively supported by LyX.
3. 'Breaking' changes
LyX already supports a range of commands that break the text flow, particularly different sorts of page breaks (in LaTeX, \newpage, clearpage etc.). Similar such breaks of other text elements can easily be defined via a new layout tag BreakCommand.
Through this, LyX now natively supports \columnbreak in multicol module and \framebreak in beamer. All these breaking commands are accessible via Insert→Formatting.
4. Cross-referencing improvements
LyX 2.5 brought about significant improvements to cross-referencing. LyX 2.6 will build on and refine that:
- LyX can now natively support formatted references which are not natively supported by a cross reference package. For instance, we now support linguistic examples and tableaux.
- LyX can now generate localizations of formatted cross-reference strings (such as "section 1") for languages not supported by a cross-reference package.
- Cross-references in math now have feature parity with those in text.
5. Categories
