[OS X TeX] TeXnicle 2.0

[Gary L. Gray]

On Dec 27, 2012, at 9:22 AM, Herbert Schulz <herbs at wideopenwest.com> wrote:

> TeXnicle 2.0, a free (as in beer) front end Editor/Previewer for TeX has been released. You can get it at <http://www.bobsoft-mac.de/texnicle/texnicle.html>. Anyone interested in testing and reviewing the app? Looks like it might have some nice features.

I spent about 45 minutes with it last night (more on the length of time spent soon). I really like the interface and it brings a project paradigm that doesn't exist with TeXShop (i.e., tying a group of files together as being in the same project). This appears to allow one to typeset a file that is input by a main driver file rather than the driver file itself (I was not able to test this on the project in question for reasons also outlined below). With this in mind, importing a large project (my textbook) with over 9000 files and taking up about 6GB of disk space took a **really long time**. Here is what I did.

I created a new project and then told it to import existing files. After doing so, I chose the Main.tex driver file that \includes all the sections for all the chapters. After about 15 seconds, it loaded Main.tex, the front matter, and the appendices (there is not much to those), but not one of the 10 chapters. I was able to use the interface to load each chapter, but it took several minutes to load each chapter. After loading the first three, noticed that the Main.texnicle file it creates as part of the project was 3.5MB and TeXnicle was using over 6GB of RAM (I have 16GB)! I was also found that everything I tried doing within the TeXnicle window was causing my Mac to beachball. Something that should have taken a handful of minutes was at 45 minutes and I gave up. It was not a pleasant experience.

The app really shows some promise, but it is not ready for big projects. I may yet try it on things like letters and the like since it does live update the PDF preview as you write, but I am in no hurry to do so.

Gary