When I first made the switch from Word to LaTeX, I felt the need for a dedicated LaTeX editor to provide help and guidance. Fortunately for OS X users, there is Dick Koch’s TeXShop. I was lucky. It did just what I expected and it comfortably eased me into the world of TeX. I no longer use TeXShop because:
- I use a text editor for a number of other tasks (including but not limited to keeping my calendar with Remind, keeping notes in Markdown, constructing to do lists…) and felt it would be counterproductive to proliferate editors when all of these tasks are text based.
- Relatedly, as I was worked increasingly with text files, I found the need for advanced text editing features not found in TeXShop.
Still, I would unhesitantly recommend TeXShop to any one new to TeX on OS X, and many much more proficient TeXnicians than I use TeXShop on a daily basis.
There are dedicated LaTeX editors on other platforms, but none are configured the way TeXShop is. (The LaTeX editors available for Windows that I have seen makes me weep.) Jonathan Kew, the developer of XeTeX, hopes to correct this situation with TeXWorks:
The TeXworks project is an effort to build a simple TeX front-end program (working environment) that will be available for all today’s major desktop operating systems—in particular, MS Windows (XP and Vista), typical GNU/Linux distros and other X11-based systems, and Mac OS X. It is deliberately modeled on Dick Koch’s award-winning TeXShop for Mac OS X, which is credited with a resurgence of TeX usage on the Mac platform.
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