[OS X TeX] Mavericks TeXShop Problem

[Richard Koch]

Folks,

Zhiming Wang and I have been discussing an interesting TeXShop problem
on Mavericks when used with an external editor. In this configuration,
TeXShop periodically looks at the creation date and time of the pdf file and
reloads this file is its creation time changes. Wang reported that TeXShop
became much less responsive in this mode under Mavericks, and
suggested that the problem was caused by the App Nap feature of
Mavericks. Indeed, TeXShop has a timer which checks the creation date once a second.
Under App Nap, this is slowed to once every 10 seconds.

Wang discovered that

	defaults write TeXShop NSAppSleepDisabled -bool YES

fixes the problem. Documentation suggests that this fix MIGHT have to
be reapplied after each system boot; we aren’t certain.
Annoyingly, most applications have a check box in their Get Info panel
disabling App Napp. But this easier fix isn’t available in TeXShop. 

After two hours with the documentation, I found out why. Apple automatically
provides the Get Info checkbox so they can enable App Nap for all apps, and
yet provide a fix when this breaks the app. But the check box is not provided if the
app is compiled with XCode 5 using the latest 10.9 API’s, because then
presumably the programmer knew about App Nap and did the right thing.

I’ll have a fix next Monday, In the meantime, use the temporary defaults fix.

Dick