General ⇒ What do you use for writing content?

[ironmathyu5]

Hi everyone,

I am currently writing my thesis using LaTeX. Not a complete noob, but not advanced by any means. I love using LaTeX and have made loads of smaller reports and other projects (working on a cookbook for my mum!).

The thing I find difficult is "creative" writing. Back in the old days of using MS Word, I was a heavy user of the highlight feature, where I would just jot down a sentence or a paragraph and highligh it to remind myself to come back an properly write it out coherently. Or using bullet points for organising my thoughts which I would later fill out. Either of these options would really stand out of the rest of the formatted text, so it was easy to spot.

I am currently using Sublime Text with LatexTools (love it), but my issue is trying to pin point those areas I need to come back to without adding a \todo note, which consequently would require me to look at the PDF, as the \todo is easy to miss in the middle of other commands sprinkled in the text (mostly \cite{}). I am finding it hard to quickly look at my wall of text/code and pin-pointing a section to work on, without building the PDF, and almost going page by page to try to remember or to look at the /todonotes.

I guess my question is, does anyone have a recommendation for a software for writing? I do not mind at all writing in latex (that is, adding $$ and \cite{}, etc) and it not being picked up by the editor so that I can at the end just copy and paste sections into sublimeText. Would just love some sort of WYSIWYG for the writing process, rather than the typesetting process. Perhaps there's an IDE out there where I can highlight or somewhat mark code?

Thanks in advance!

[Ijon Tichy]

If you always create todo notes in the same way it should be easy to search and find them. Almost every editor provides search.

Just a note: I always use comments like
% TODO: explain this better
so I just have to search for the regular expression "% *TODO:" to find all my todos. I also often use grep to generate a short list of all todos. But you can use package todo together with very similar searches if you need more.

BTW: In LaTeX you should never use $$…$$.