[OS X TeX] migrating from Emacs to TexShop

[Enrico Franconi]

On 4 Feb 2012, at 20:17, marian wrote:

> I have been an Emacs user for almost 20 years.  When I was young, I was a
> sophisticated one, and I would write Emacs Lisp code to get the editor to do
> exactly what I wanted.  Nowadays, I can't even be bothered to figure out how
> to configure Emacs so that its TeX-specific features work.

My story exactly. After 25+ year of excellent service, I started to leave emacs task by task, and few weeks ago I decided to move away from it forever - for the reasons you are saying: I feel a perennial beta-tester, and I have not anymore the age for it :-)
One year ago I moved all my LaTeXing to Latexian (something similar to TeXShop, but more elegant and more LaTeX-task specific IMHO (and not free, but just 8€ after 30-days free trial)). BTW, I invite you to test it and judge yourself which one do you prefer.
For the rest text-based editing, I moved to BBEdit.

> there didn't seem to be any equivalent to Emacs's fill-paragraph command.

My first question as well. The solution provided by others in response to your question does not really capture the power and beauty of emacs' fill-paragraph. 
I worked out a satisfactory solution in terms of a Mac 'service'. These are system-wide general procedures which can be used from within any (modern) application over standard types, such as a text.
I've created a service called 'Tidy.service' which does a LaTeX-aware clean formatting á la fill-paragraph of the selected text - from within TeXShop, Latexian, whatever.
It has to be installed in ~/Library/Services/
You can bind this service to any application-specific key (I chose the familiar CTRL-SHIFT-Q...).
If there is enough interest I can donate the service to be distributed with MacTeX, even though I voluntarily abandoned several years ago the relation-with-angry-customers camp (I maintained the first emacs distro for the Mac)...
Meanwhile I'm sending it to you privately by email to test it.
Regarding your other questions, I guess the answer you got are already good answers: basically, the Mac has its own standard way of moving within text (arrows w/wo CMD/ALT/SHIFT/CTRL), while it also honour some basic emacs binding; nonetheless, from the system preferences you can rebind basically everything at your own pleasure - even if this will bring you back to square one, namely you start wasting time to configure the system, so you better learn the new bindings :-)
cheers
--e.
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