[OS X TeX] migrating from Emacs to TexShop

[David Watson]

On Feb 4, 2012, at 1:17 PM, marian wrote:
> A number of things, however, don't seem so convenient.  First, the first
> thing I noticed when I started editing a TeX file of mine using TeXShop is
> that there didn't seem to be any equivalent to Emacs's fill-paragraph
> command.  I concluded that the reason was probably that TeXShop expected you
> to keep each paragraph as a single line, so I converted my file to put each
> paragraph in a single line.  But I am not happy with this solution for two
> reasons.  First, it will make it hard to share files between the Mac and
> Unix.  Second, it makes the Emacs commands involving the beginning and end
> of line (C-a, C-e, C-k, etc.) behave very differently: going to the
> beginning of the line now takes you, in effect, to the beginning of the
> paragraph.  Second, as noted in the thread on getting the Meta-based

I prefer to write each sentence on a single line. Then the key-bindings work as expected, and you can readily see how many sentences are in any given paragraph.

> commands to work, the PageUp and PageDown keys don't move the cursor as in
> Emacs (or at least the version of it I was using), and at least until I set
> up the hack to get the Meta-based bindings to work, C-v/M-v is not an
> alternative.
> Finally, there are lots of Emacs features that I rarely use but that are
> extremely useful once in a while, for instance the commands to manipulate
> rectangles.  As far as I understand, there would is just no TeXShop
> equivalent or workaround for any of them.  Do people resort to using another
> editor?  Using a scripting language?
> 

I use emacs as well, although much of my work in the past few years is easier with vi, but let's not go into that.
For things like the rectangle insertion and deletion, I save the file, and then head to the Terminal.app where I can use emacs.
I haven't found anything better for that purpose, but then again, I haven't bothered to look.

> I am willing to learn new ways of working, and even to use the mouse on
> occasion, but they should be more or less as efficient as the old ones.  So
> far, I am impressed with the TeX-specific features of TeXShop and with the
> fact that it worked out-of-the-box, without the endless fiddling that seems
> necessary to get anything to work properly on Emacs.  But it also seems
> really inflexible and to lack not just some of the more esoteric features of
> Emacs, which I rarely use, but even some basic movement commands.  I want to
> just buy a Mac and use TeXShop and forget about all that complicated Unix
> stuff.  But these issues are holding me back, and I don't have a good sense
> of whether TeXShop is just very limited or whether there are alternatives
> and workarounds I don't know about yet.

Get your mac, and use the built-in terminal (found in /Applications/Utilities) for emacs when you need it.
OS X is built on top of a certified Unix system, so all of the stuff you know and love is still there.

There's also X11 (or XQuartz if you're not satisfied with Apple's offering) so you can use some of the same Unixy things you are familiar with.

Cheers


--
David Watson
Graduate Student
Medicinal Chemistry
425 Faser Hall
University MS  38677
662 915 16 63