[texworks] Some remarks

Bruno Voisin bvoisin at me.com
Thu Oct 30 16:52:48 CET 2008


Le 30 oct. 08 à 07:27, Jonathan Kew a écrit :

> On 30 Oct 2008, at 13:50, Alain Delmotte wrote:
>
>> Also, it would be good to have all shortcuts duplicated without "\"
>
> I'd be interested to hear what others think about this. The current  
> list basically comes from what's distributed with TeXShop. I've  
> noticed that some abbreviations are provided without \, but others  
> aren't; I'm not a heavy user of these so I don't feel qualified to  
> say what's most useful.
>
>> as this is difficult to enter on some keyboards (ex. French: AltGr 
>> +<, or even Ctrl+Alt+<);
>
> How do French TeX users tolerate this in general? If I were a French  
> TeX user, I think I'd want a customized layout as a matter of urgency!

Well, that's not better on the Mac. For example:

\ = Alt-Shift-:
{ = Alt-(
} = Alt-)
[ = Alt-Shift-(
] = Alt-Shift-)

which makes it impossible to key certain shortcuts in some  
applications (there used to be one -- Classic Textures IIRC -- which  
had both Cmd-[ and Cmd-Shift-[ -- for Indent and Unindent IIRC -- with  
the second impossible on the French keyboard since [ requires Shift  
already). I checked that Cmd-Alt-Shift-: (for Cmd-\) works and does  
provide Show/Hide Output though.

Worst of all the acute accent:

´ = Alt-Shift-&

so that É for example is Alt-Shift-& then Shift-e! The most common  
French accents, namely the acute and the grave, are generally only  
used with the letters e for the acute and e, a and u for the grave,  
and were omitted on uppercase letters until recently. So é è ç à ù  
have their own keys, but for the other combinations dead keys are  
required, with Alt-Shift-& for ´ the worst.

On the annoying side are also:

+ = Shift-=
~ = Alt+n+Space

(~ is considered an accent, so it's a dead key and needs to be  
followed by Space to yield the accent on its own).

>> 3) Keyboard shortcuts: I propose to replace Ctrl+G for "Search  
>> again" by Ctrl+Shift+F to be coherent with Ctrl+Shift+R "Replace  
>> again".
>> But this would require to have another shortcut for "Full screen"
>
> Not a problem at the moment, because Full Screen is only available  
> for the PDF window, and there are currently no search features  
> there. But I hope to implement search in the PDF eventually, so we  
> need to anticipate that.
>
> How about:
>
>  Ctrl-F        Find
>  Ctrl-Shift-F  Find Again     (was Ctrl-G)
>  Ctrl-R        Replace
>  Ctrl-Shift-R  Replace Again
>  Ctrl-G        Go to Line     (was Ctrl-L)
>  Ctrl-L        Show Selection (was Ctrl-=)
>
>  Ctrl-=        Show/Hide Output
>
>  Ctrl-0        Full Screen    (was Ctrl-Shift-F)
>
> Any thoughts?

That would disrupt usual shortcuts on the Mac, where in the built-in  
text editors:

Find            Cmd-F
Find Again      Cmd-G
Replace         Does not exist (provided by Find)
Replace Again   Does not exist (provided by Find Again)
Go to Line      Cmd-L
Show Selection  Cmd-E

and in the build-in previewers:

Full Screen     Cmd-Shift-F
Go to Page	Cmd-Alt-G

By the way, the TeXworks shortcut Cmd-< for Unindent hijacks the OS- 
wide shortcut Cmd-< for "Move focus to next window in active  
application" on the French keyboard (as defined by default in System  
Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse > Keyboard Shortcuts). It's one of  
these odd shortcuts assigned to a physical key (the key immediately on  
the right of the Shift key) instead of a logical key. And the key  
immediately on the right of the Shift key turns out to be < on the  
French keyboard.

>> 4) When one "Save" a new file or "Save as": one should take care to  
>> add the .tex extension.
>> I propose to have it automatically added!!
>
> Yes. Unfortunately, the platform File-Save dialogs don't all behave  
> in quite the same way, but I'll look into this. Forcing the presence  
> of the extension (so it is impossible to Save As a filename with no  
> extension) seems a bit severe to me, but it would be good to do the  
> "right thing" by default as much as possible.

I'd vote against this, at least unless it's possible to edit the  
extension manually in the Save/Save As panel. You may want to save  
your file with extension .dtx or even .txt from within TeXworks.

That's an area where I think TeXShop is in error, by insisting on  
adding the extension .tex to every file the built-in editor creates.  
(Or if there's a way to disable this feature, I've missed it.)

Bruno Voisin


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