Editors: Advantages and disadvantages (Was: [OS X TeX] encoding and special characters in TexShop)

[Robert Spence]

On 17 Sep 2006, at 14:00 , Alex Hamann wrote:

[snip]
> I had been using TexShop set to use Mac OS Roman (although I am  
> trying to figure out if I should try to learn using Aquamacs... or  
> maybe turn to iTexMac... maybe somebody can give me some advice on  
> the advantages and disavantages of the three in a new thread?)

This is just the personal view of an unbiased non-expert who likes to  
experiment a bit:

1) TeXShop as an editor:

--advantage: sometimes it's convenient not to have to open too many  
programs all at once, especially if you're working on a 12-inch  
PowerBook :-)

--disadvantage: scrolling while marking long passages of text is very  
slow on my system (or can that perhaps be customized?); it almost  
certainly wasn't intended to be a super-powerful editor in the first  
place, though.

2) Aquamacs as an editor:

[people's perceptions of advantages and disadvantages here are likely  
to depend on whether or not they're comparing Aquamacs to some other  
kind of Emacs.  In Alex Hamann's case, the balance would probably be  
something like this:]

--advantages: it provides solutions for practically all problems  
related to character-encoding; it's completely customizable (you want  
Jewish holidays in your calendar? you want to add an extra item to  
one of the pull-down menus? not satisfied with the standard LaTeX  
syntax highlighting color theme? no problem...); customizing it gives  
you the opportunity to practise doing some simple programming in Lisp.

--disadvantage: you'll have so much fun customizing it that you'll  
spend most of your time doing nothing else for a few weeks (once you  
get over the strangeness of the GUI)

3) iTeXMac as an editor:

[the whole package is quite similar to TeXShop]

--advantages: an all-in-one solution, like TeXShop; but the scrolling  
seems to work much better on my system than it does with the built-in  
editor in TeXShop

--disadvantages: ?? [...don't know it well enough to offer an  
opinion...]

4) Fazit:

Alex---Do yourself a favour: Spend a couple of weeks playing with  
Aquamacs.

[Sorry---I lied about being unbiased.]

;-)

-- Rob Spence
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