LaTeX people, which editor?

[oboeguy]

Remember this thread?

I decided on "Guide to LaTeX" and I am quite pleased with my choice. It's a new edition and very much up to date. It looks like a great balance of intro and reference manual. The authors apparently wrote the book itself using WinEdt for their LaTeX (not to be confused with WindEdit). The student license is a mere $20, but emacs + AucTeX is still, as always, free (the latter is actually new to me; call me oldschool). Has anybody used WinEdt and liked it? I'm going to try the shareware demo, but I'd appreciate input from real users (or fanboys even 😀).

 

[oboeguy]

Edit: I'm also checking out the other editor suggested in my previous thread, of course.

 

[cquark]

Try TeXnicCenter. It's free and more capable than WinEDT.
http://www.toolscenter.org/front_content.php

 

[oboeguy]

I noticed that one from the old thread. I'm downloading it right now. It's hung-up for the moment...

While I have your attention... any favorite LaTeX packages?

 

[oboeguy]

Well that went off rather well... TeXnicCenter crashed while in the configuration wizard. :grumble; (we need an emoticon for that)

 

[gwlam12]

I used WinEdt and liked it. After the trial period, a message will pop up telling you to register. Gets annoying but you can still use it.

But WinEdt was the only thing I've ever used.

 

[Wadded Beef]

sorry i'm not into latex.

 

[eLiu]

hm interesting...i need to learn LaTeX. So you say that book is a good reference? What others did you look at?

 

[MaxDepth]

You need to move off that dinosaur while you have a chance.

 

[arcas]

Have you tried vim (or one of the GUI-fied versions)? It's basically VI but it supports syntax highlighting and automatic indentation, folding, etc. Perhaps more importantly, it supports just about any platform.

edit:

Looking at the syntax definitions directory of my vim installation, I see syntax files for 344 different languages and filetypes ranging from your standard programming languages (C, Haskell, FORTRAN, etc) to markup languages (HTML, XML, TeX, etc) to Windows registry syntax to various configuration file syntaxes (Sendmail, Procmail, etc). There's even support for VHDL.

 

[oboeguy]

eLiu, I also have (somewhere) an old book written by the original LaTeX guy (Lamport) which was my first intro to LaTeX. There's a PDF on the 'net called "Not so short intro to LaTeX" or something like that which probably covers about the same stuff. So I'd say get a hold of that and then get "Guide to LaTeX, 4th edition", which is what I recently picked-up. It happens to have bundled a CD with the TeX User's Group "TeXLive" distribution, an unexpected bonus.

Edit: vim? Blasphemy! I'll stick to emacs if I'm to go with a general-purpose editor. 😀

 

[desteffy]

WinEdt is pretty good, I used that as a starter program. Emacs is better though, I'd suggest you make use of it.

 

[oboeguy]

Update here... I've started using TeXnicCenter and I'm happy with it so far. I like how you can configure different "output profiles". Very handy.

 

[rgwalt]

I use TextPad.

R