[OS X TeX] Experience with TeXnicle?

[Berend Hasselman]

On 28-01-2012, at 16:25, Herbert Schulz wrote:

> Howdy,
> 
> We recently had some discussion about Editor/Front Ends for TeX and enthusastic mention was made of Latexian.
> 
> I mentioned another Front End that might be something for folks to look at called TeXnicle, <http://www.bobsoft-mac.de/texnicle/texnicle.html>, and wonder if there are folks out there using it and their experience with it.

I had a look at it end  of december 2011. I didn't really like it.

Just now I went to the TeXnicle site to see what the latest had to offer.
There is a Changelog but it's a .rtf file (why?)(make it plain text).

Some remarks:

1. No keyboard shortcut to switch focus from left pane to document pane to pdf preview pane and any combination

2. No synchronizing mouse clicks to switch between pdf and .tex file (a la TextMate+Skim and TeXShop)

At least I wasn't able to find anything.

3. Cocoa textview: with the cursor/caret on a line at the bottom/top of window, and then moving down/up  makes the text jump with highlighted line in middle of window. TeXShop does this (other editors also have this behaviour): incredibly irritating and confusing.

It doesn't have smooth scrolling using arrow keys (neither does TeXShop). This is most likely a limitation of Cocoa TextView.

4. No keyboard shortcut to put cursor/highlight in middle of window/screen a la BBEdit/TextWrangler/TextMate (TeXShop
doesn't have it either). (Yes I know that you can use Alt+PgUp/PgDn to keep the highlight visible in the middle of the screen but that only works as long as you don't have a customized KeyBindings.dict. The problem is that Apple by default has a different effect of PgUp/PgDn compared to many other systems.)

The last two issues (item 3 and 4) make an editor a lot less usable. You are forced to using the mouse with
unneccesary clicking.

Regardless  of any LaTeX niceties TeXnicle may or may not have, I don't like the editor and I won't give up on TextMate or BBEdit easily. Especially TextMate currently serves me adequately.

5. I can't remember if it had an option to highlight the current line a=in the editor.

Berend