Editors: Advantages and disadvantages (Was: [OS X TeX] encoding and special characters in TexShop)

[Claus Gerhardt]

I am familiar with BBEdit, TeXShop and iTeXMac (v. 1.xx). BBedit is  
certainly the best editor of the three, but TS is more than  
sufficient for my purposes, since I only use it for my tex documents.  
Moreover, since I use Flashmode and synchronization, the interaction  
editor/previewer is very important for me, and in this respect the  
combination TS/TS is by far the best of all possible combinations   
editor/previewer that I know of and that I had to test a lot.

It might be that my conclusions are only relevant for people using a  
fast computer and a large monitor; however, in this case I am  
challenging the wisdom of working with PowerBooks, unless of course  
one is forced to.

Claus



On Sep 17, 2006, at 18:12, Robert Spence wrote:

> On 17 Sep 2006, at 14:00 , Alex Hamann wrote:
>
> [snip]
>> I had been using TexShop set to use Mac OS Roman (although I am  
>> trying to figure out if I should try to learn using Aquamacs... or  
>> maybe turn to iTexMac... maybe somebody can give me some advice on  
>> the advantages and disavantages of the three in a new thread?)
>
> This is just the personal view of an unbiased non-expert who likes  
> to experiment a bit:
>
> 1) TeXShop as an editor:
>
> --advantage: sometimes it's convenient not to have to open too many  
> programs all at once, especially if you're working on a 12-inch  
> PowerBook :-)
>
> --disadvantage: scrolling while marking long passages of text is  
> very slow on my system (or can that perhaps be customized?); it  
> almost certainly wasn't intended to be a super-powerful editor in  
> the first place, though.
>
> 2) Aquamacs as an editor:
>
> [people's perceptions of advantages and disadvantages here are  
> likely to depend on whether or not they're comparing Aquamacs to  
> some other kind of Emacs.  In Alex Hamann's case, the balance would  
> probably be something like this:]
>
> --advantages: it provides solutions for practically all problems  
> related to character-encoding; it's completely customizable (you  
> want Jewish holidays in your calendar? you want to add an extra  
> item to one of the pull-down menus? not satisfied with the standard  
> LaTeX syntax highlighting color theme? no problem...); customizing  
> it gives you the opportunity to practise doing some simple  
> programming in Lisp.
>
> --disadvantage: you'll have so much fun customizing it that you'll  
> spend most of your time doing nothing else for a few weeks (once  
> you get over the strangeness of the GUI)
>
> 3) iTeXMac as an editor:
>
> [the whole package is quite similar to TeXShop]
>
> --advantages: an all-in-one solution, like TeXShop; but the  
> scrolling seems to work much better on my system than it does with  
> the built-in editor in TeXShop
>
> --disadvantages: ?? [...don't know it well enough to offer an  
> opinion...]
>
> 4) Fazit:
>
> Alex---Do yourself a favour: Spend a couple of weeks playing with  
> Aquamacs.
>
> [Sorry---I lied about being unbiased.]
>
> ;-)
>
> -- Rob Spence
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