[Mac OS X TeX] Text Editor, spell checker, and TeX engine interoperability

[Michael Goldweber]

<x-flowed>I have always been a firm believer that each application should do 
one thing well and easily interoperate with companion applications. 
(I am also a big fan of editors that allow one to use the standard 
emacs keyboard bindings e.g. cntrl-a, cntrl-k etc.)

It is for this reason, under OS 9 and earlier, I used Alpha, 
Excalibur, and OzTeX.  My TeX engine was not also an editor.  My 
editor was not a spell checker, etc.  Furthermore, except for the 
Excalibur back to Alpha transition all the transitions were seamless 
via keyboard shortcuts.

The advantage of one spell checker, for example, is that each 
application one uses makes learning how to use the spell checker 
embedded in each separate app unnecessary, and it allows me to have 
one customized dictionary set instead of many.

Has anyone found an editor - spell checker - TeX engine combination 
under OS X to work as described above?

I admit to being stuck on Excalibur since it understands TeX very 
well and beautifully interoperates with Eudora.

BBedit (at least BBedit lite's) transition to the TeX engine is 
awkward.  I admit to not deeply investigating the option of setting 
this up as a keyboard shortcut.  Anyway BBedit, to my knowledge, does 
not support emacs keybindings.  Furthermore, I do not know how to get 
BBedit to talk to Excalibur.

Pepper seems promising in that it supports emacs keybindings, but I 
do not know how to interoperate it with either Excalibur or any OS X 
TeX engine (CMacTeX, TeXshop, or plain command line texmf).

TeXShop's editor is not sophisticated enough for me, nor does it talk 
to Excalibur.

Has anyone know of a solution?  (I know that I could install the 
auc-tex package for emacs and go that route --either under X using 
either XDarwin or XTools, or with the Acqua port of emacs-- (using 
ispell etc.) but then I lose any Mac advantage editors like Alpha, 
BBedit, or pepper offer.

mikeyg


-- 



Michael Goldweber			Associate Professor of Computer Science
Xavier University			Dept. of Math and Computer Science
email: mikeyg at cerebro.cs.xu.edu	3800 Victory Parkway
phone: (513) 745-3936         		Cincinnati OH 45207-4441
fax: (513) 745-3272
http://cerebro.xu.edu/~mikeyg/


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