[OS X TeX] I'm done with TeXShop as my main editor

[Adam Goldstein]

Paul Smyth wrote:
> I'm finding it a bit annoying the negativity being displayed on this 
> list towards certain pieces of software. First we have Gerhardt 
> castigating i-Installer et. al. Now we have this thread. I use TeXShop 
> and find it eminently suitable for my purposes. Ok,  you prefer VI or 
> Vim or whatever. Why tell us about if if not to imply that that there 
> is something difficient about TeXShop. I'm sure the rest of us don't 
> care what software you use. The tone of your subject line alone is 
> quite dismissive of TeXShop. The problem is that with this kind of 
> negativity towards something like TeXShop the guys that write and 
> maintain it will justly feel they are wasting their time and quite 
> possibly give up. We've already had this situation happen once 
> recently on this list. I for one do not want to see that happen.
>
> Paul Smyth
>
>
I was a bit surprised at first to see the initial poster's subject line, 
but it seemed as though he was just being enthusiastic about vi. He 
wouldn't be the first . . .

For my two cents, I use emacs.app (the cocoa emacs), but I still keep 
TeXShop in the dock. There is something reassuring about seeing it there.

I find that I use a kind of cross between mousing around and using the 
key combinations in emacs, which I have found to be highly intuitive. 
It's so well documented that you can usually find out what you need to 
do pretty quickly.

Also, there's auctex, which has great highlighting and lots of great 
shortcuts. It is great for beamer, for instance, and compiling LaTeX 
documents is much more reliable because I use all the shortcuts to get 
auctex to complete environments, provide new list items, and so on; and 
the highlighting makes it easy to spot parens that are not closed 
properly, or a missing "$".

I tried the PDFView application, which is quite nice, as well. I wish 
that it could do the presentation mode on a second monitor; the screen 
just goes black.

I agree with a poster on another thread, though: it is slower than 
TeXniscope and TeXshop when doing the rendering. For a short document 
that's not complicated, it's fine, though.

-Adam
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