[Mac OS X TeX] The role of TeXShop

[Jon Guyer]

At 11:14 AM +0100 1/15/02, Bruno Voisin wrote:

>Using TeXShop as a compiler would make it similar to any other
>Unix-flavoured TeX implementation, with one program for editing,
>another for compiling, another for previewing, another for printing.
>Very un-Mac to me!

You've evidently never heard of OpenDoc. Small, well designed tools 
for each task /is/ the Mac way. Monolithic, oppressive, "why in the 
world would you ever want to leave me?!?" applications are the 
Microsoft way. The unix way feels gross because you /don't/ have an 
integrated set of tools, but rather a bunch of unintegrated tools 
that all happen to have to be used together to get anything done.

I'm not at all putting TeXShop in the monolithic category (I haven't 
had any time at all to play with it, so I don't know), but external 
editor support is a pet peeve of mine. I'm one of the Alpha Cabal 
(developers of Alpha in Pete Keleher's absence); Rich Siegel and I 
have commiserated on a couple of occasions about the baffling amount 
of work that some folks put into creating their own spiffy editor 
when they could have bootstrapped off of our (and a lot of other 
people's) work in very short order. Bare Bones' ODB Editor suite is 
trivially easy to implement (I've done it) and it handles most, if 
not all, that you would want to do in an external editor. Supporting 
eunuchs editors would be different, but not hard.

>I think it's good to make the use of external
>editors possible, for those inclined to work this way, but that
>shouldn't be done to the detriment of the built-in editor.

And Joachim didn't suggest that it should be.

-- 

   Jonathan E. Guyer
   <http://www.his.com/jguyer/>

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