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

[Herbert Schulz]

On Sep 17, 2006, at 11:12 AM, Robert Spence wrote:

>
> 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.
>

Howdy,

For long passages it is usually best to place the cursor (insertion  
point? ;-)) at the beginning of the passage, scrolling to bottom of  
the passage and Shift-Click to get all the text between the two  
points selected.

You can also get (some) of the functionality of Emacs into any editor  
that uses the NSTextView Cocoa Framework (e.g., Mail and TeXShop) by  
using a DefaultKeyBinding.dict file in ~/Library/KeyBindings/. I've  
got it set up so Ctl-X Space sets ``the mark,'' Ctl-X Ctl-M selects  
between the insertion point and the mark and Ctl-X Ctl-X swaps the  
insertion point and mark (very handy when looking at different  
sections of the source).

You can get that and some other, TeXShop specific, customizations/ 
additions in the TeXShopKit.zip file at <http://homepage.mac.com/ 
herbs2/>.

Good Luck,

Herb Schulz
(herbs at wideopenwest.com)


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