Yes to all questions, but not necessarily the editor itself does that.
A LaTeX editor it tries to assist you in as much as you need to memorize less commands. Say you want to insert the symbol φ into an equation, in Word and in the Latex editor you can click the φ button, but if you know the command is \phi you can simply enter it and continue typing without taking your hands off the keyboard.
The same is true for more complex constructs. The Latex editor will for instance assist you in adding figures by inserting all the boilerplate markup text necessary for this. But in principle you could do away with a special Latex editor and use a simple plain text editor.
This would be the instruction to insert a graphic into a floated figure, i.e., it would be placed with some whitespace in the corner of a page, independent of the surrounding text, like e.g. in a journal.
Code:
\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics{image.jpeg}
\caption{An example figure}
\label{fig:the-example}
\end{figure}
The crucial difference between Word and Latex is that TeX, the actual engine, devotes a lot more thought on how the elements in your document will be layouted. This additional computation goes from small scale things, like how high to place numerator in a fraction and calculate its surrounding spacing, to large scale things, like how it distributes words into lines and paragraphs, how much text to fit on a page, where to dynamically float the figures so that a typographically optimal page layout is achieved.
In Word things have to be reasonably quick, because the image of the page is calculated and refreshed after every keystroke. So it compromises on a lot of quality aspects. In Latex this is not necessary because the real typesetting is only done when the user thinks it is time to check the final output.
Latex has a lot more advantages for scientific writing. It handles cross-references, citations and bibliographies, TOCs, tables and figures and more in a clean, explicit, and consistent manner. Not necessarily without some effort (you have to learn how to do it), but a lot less pain once you master it.
There are a multitude of templates for all fields and styles, in addition to many packages that do some very specific small things. One can get lost in this wealth of information in the beginning, but TeX is more than 30 years old and many people have used and contributed to it.
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Originally Posted by hugmenot
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