[OS X TeX] how to handle window-mania?

[Curtis Clifton]

On Oct 14, 2004, at 5:16 AM, Will Robertson wrote:

> On 14 Oct 2004, at 7:19 PM, Stephan Hochhaus wrote:
>
>> How do you handle open windows when there's more than one window open?
>
> I've been thinking for ages that a CMD-2 shortcut (I know, it's 
> already taken, but I think it should take precedence) to cycle between 
> source windows would be really nice. (Or it could cycle through 
> whatever the frontmost window is.) I guess that wouldn't be too hard 
> to Applescript, actually.

I sometimes use Cmd-` to cycle through the windows of the current 
(Cocoa) application.  Cmd-~ cycles the opposite direction.  Maybe 
Cmd-Opt-` could be used to cycle source windows if people are concerned 
about the Cmd-2 precedent.

> Usually I set it up so that I've got the source of one document one 
> the left, and the source of another on the right, and keep the pdfs 
> and consoles as minimised as possible. Exposé doesn't help too much 
> coz all the windows look similar.

I agree with the Exposé sentiment.  I regularly use Exposé, but find it 
doesn't help much when I've got three of four windows of LaTeX source.

In OmniOutliner I've taken to coloring the background of different 
documents so that they are easy to distinguish when “Exposéd”.  
Choosing a light, pastel background color doesn't negatively effect 
readability.  Perhaps TeXShop could allow setting a background color on 
a per-source basis.  This could be remembered by keeping a cache 
mapping files to background colors within TeXShop's saved preferences 
(or with a meta-data facility, but lets not open that can of worms 
here).  BBEdit 8 uses this mapping approach.

The background color of the source document could, optionally, also be 
used for the corresponding console and pdf.  The three windows for a 
document (source, console, and pdf) are sufficiently different that 
even if they are the same color they could still be differentiated when 
Exposéd.  An wilder idea would be to integrate this with pdfsync for 
pdfs generated from multiple sources (i.e., include files).  The 
previewer could render the background of each page of the pdf in the 
appropriate color based on the include file that describes that page.

Curt

----------------------------------
Curtis Clifton, PhD Candidate
Dept. of Computer Science, Iowa State University
http://www.cs.iastate.edu/~cclifton

--------------------- Info ---------------------
Mac-TeX Website: http://www.esm.psu.edu/mac-tex/
           & FAQ: http://latex.yauh.de/faq/
TeX FAQ: http://www.tex.ac.uk/faq
List Post: <mailto:MacOSX-TeX at email.esm.psu.edu>