[texworks] Earlier thoughts

[Will Robertson]

On 21/09/2008, at 7:12 PM, Jérome Laurens wrote:

> Jonathan says that TeXWorks is meant for newbies, it is an excellent  
> starting point.
> It is not hard to be convinced that no environment exists for newbies,
> even TeXShop.

There are some good points you raise there.

I prefer to think about TeXworks (and TeXShop) not as "the editor for  
newbies", but rather, "the *easiest* editor". The development effort  
is focussed on removing the friction involved with opening up a  
document and working with it.

For large projects, I much prefer a more full-featured editor like  
TextMate. But for small documents, even with .dtx files that don't  
even have correct syntax colouring in most editors (AucTeX is a  
notable exception), I find TeXShop and TeXworks (getting there) the  
easiest way to just jump in and start writing/coding.

So while, I think, one half of the "helping newbies" equation is to  
provide them with a lot of high-quality help, the other half is just  
to not overwhelm them when they first jump in. And the simple design  
of these IDEs succeeds very well at that.

I see well-designed features for templates, snippets, command  
completions, whatever, as part of this. As long as they help more than  
they add complexity.

Will