[OS X TeX] Experience with TeXnicle?

[Herbert Schulz]

On Jan 28, 2012, at 9:50 AM, Berend Hasselman wrote:

> 
> 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


Howdy,

Thanks for the information. I am a ``dedicated'' TeXShop user but am always open to other ideas.

As far as Smooth Scrolling is concerned you might try to check System Preferences->General->Use smooth scrolling. Of course that's a global setting but I'd guess those that like that behavior...

My main negative with using TextMate is that it always feels very slow. I guess not knowing it very well (while knowing TeXShop quite well) hinders my use. let me ask, how do you create ``custom engines'' for using latexmk, sage, etc., with TextMate?

Good Luck,

Herb Schulz
(herbs at wideopenwest dot com)