[Mac OS X TeX] Re: Trying to get something Alpha-ish in Mac OS X

[Eric Hsu]

Hi folks,

Excellent banter about pros and cons of editors. It's nice to hear 
reports from editor advocates.  Random notes:

(1) My recollection of changing line endings in Alpha7 was that it 
was in theory just a popup, but I recall some peculiar troubles I had 
with mixed line-ending files, something to the effect of the popup 
change not changing all line endings.  The font thing I remember with 
more annoyance. I agree that it was doable ( I did do it!), but I 
always found it unintuitive and lost among the many config options 
that seem to terrify newcomers to Alpha.

(2)  This was a clever post from Martin Costabel:

>  > Let me know if you find something even better!  (I'm not learning
>  > Emacs... sorry.)
>
>You ask a question and say immediately that you don't want to hear the
>answer. Can't be helped, I guess.

Can someone comment on some specific advantages Emacs gives you for 
editing Perl/TeX/HTML?  Even better would be someone who switched 
>from BBEdit/Alpha/Pepper to XEmacs or Emacs.  Mark Guzdial seems to 
have gotten Emacs religion... perhaps he can elaborate on what new 
features he's enjoying...

I have personally found the initial learning curve of Emacs to be too 
high. And this is from someone who taught himself vi, C, 6502 and 
68000 assembly language!  I have some psychological block because it 
takes so long to learn to do elementary operations (and throw in old 
bad Telnets that choked on important control characters to make it 
worse).  But I'd be willing to go there if there was a bright light 
at the end of the tunnel.

(3) Someone asked about indenting. Pepper indents text just fine 
(e.g. \item lists). I do miss Alpha's tabs re-wrapping text... when 
it worked, it was beautiful.

Also, Peter Erwin made a list of cool Alpha features. To add to his 
chart, Pepper can be configured to launch OzTeX (and I believe other 
TeXs) with Cmd-T.  Rectangular selections work fine. In theory it can 
mark files, but I haven't quite gotten the hang of it yet.

- Eric

ps. Hi Mark G! We met at CSCL in Michigan...
-- 
Eric Hsu, Assistant Professor of Mathematics
San Francisco State University
erichsu at math.sfsu.edu
http://math.sfsu.edu/hsu/

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