[OS X TeX] Re: Collaps/Hide a block of texts in TeXShop?

[Chris Skeels]

On 11/06/11 9:35 AM, "Herbert Schulz" <herbs at wideopenwest.com> wrote:

> 
> On Jun 10, 2011, at 5:57 PM, John Burt wrote:
> 
>> AlphaTk can fold blocks of TeX, and it can be used as the external editor
>> for TeXShop.
> 
> Howdy,
> 
> A couple of questions to satisfy my curiosity. What is the difference between
> AlphaX (AlphaTcl) and AlphaTk? They don't seem to have active development so I
> wonder if they are Universal? I think Lion will not have Rosetta so PPC
> emulation will die with Snow Leopard where it's an optional addition.

There are others that can answer this better than I but here goes.  AlphaX
is a version of the editor Alpha that was developed specifically to run
under OS X (10.4 or later) whereas Alpha itself was written for the classic
Mac OS.  AlphaX remains under active development.  That said, there has not
been an official release of a new version of AlphaX for quite some time.  As
I understand it, version 8.2 should be officially released soon, although
many people have been working with stable beta versions for years.

Alphatk is also a variant of Alpha but is written entirely in Tcl/Tk.  (As I
understand it AlphaX, and Alpha for that matter, are written in either C or
C++.)  Alphatk is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Unix although, to the
best of my knowledge, is not currently under active development and hasn't
been for a while.  From a Mac user's perspective, the GUI of AlphaX is more
mac-like than is that for Alphatk.  Against that, Alphatk had some features
that are yet to reach AlphaX, like the code-folding that started this
thread.

>From the AlphaTclWiki (read Alpha as meaning the family of editors including
Alpha, AlphaX and Alphatk):

> AlphaTcl is a library of Tcl scripts implementing most of the functionality of
> the text editor Alpha; AlphaTcl is not an editor in itself. A normal Alpha
> user will never have to worry about AlphaTcl: it is embedded inside Alpha. The
> functionality implemented in AlphaTcl is available from Alpha's menus like in
> any GUI text editor.
> 
> The reason for having this library of scripts instead of implementing
> everything in C is that it makes Alpha modifiable and extensible. This wiki
> contains many examples of tweakings of Alpha: new functionality provided by
> power users, prototypes of new features being implemented, etc.

Much more information about the Alpha family of editors is available at
http://alphatcl.sourceforge.net/wiki/

I hope this helps.

Cheers, Chris.
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