As stated above, I am curious to know how groff fits into people’s lives. Do you write manpages, only take notes with it, prefer it to LaTeX andor ConTeXt for text formatting, or something else entirely? Which macros do you use, if any? Let me know!
As for me, I encountered groff after already learning LaTeX, but I instantly appreciated its concise commands and began using it to take biology notes with the simple -me macro. I’m slowly expanding my usage to encompass math and graphing with eqn and grap, respectively. My needs are not always met by -me as of late, so a macro switch is in order. GNU seems most inclined to continue work on -mom, so I’ll likely switch over to that soon enough.
I only ever wrote manpages with roff. I don’t like LaTeX but at least I can be sure that there exists a LaTeX package for everything I ask for. If I used roff, I would fear that my problems can’t be solved by googling and that I would need to switch to LaTeX anyway at some point.
That’s a fair assessment. It is nice that there are so many LaTeX packages, examples, and online explanations for achieving nearly anything. LaTeX is certainly more friendly for it.
I can’t write whole document with groff at work since most of my documents are edited by multiple people :( however I do most of my pictures with PIC :D
On your point about macro packages, ms me and mm are still developed (see https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2023-07/msg00051.html) but mom has a dedicated very active author and maintainer (Peter Schaffter) so that’s why it can seems like it is being developed faster.
