Decision Guidance ⇒ TeXworks anyone? (Or something else)?

[frabjous]

Has anyone tried the new and developing TeXworks editor? I guess it's supposed to be similar to TeXshop for mac. I know very little about it, but the description on TUG sounds promising.

I'm running Ubuntu 9.04 64 bit with GNOME.

I've been happily using Kile for awhile now. I have only some small gripes with Kile: (1) I have to install a sizable chunk of KDE to use it, (2) it only syncs well with Okular as a viewer, which I dislike--not that you can't use Evince or Acrobat Reader, but then you lose forward/reverse search--and (3) parts of it are overly complicated. (I tried to customize the colors for syntax highlighting, but since there are literally (multiple) hundreds of color settings I'd need to change individually, I gave up in depair!) But overall I like it; I just think it's time to try something new.

So right now I'm going back and forth between thinking of moving next to TeXworks, or TeXmaker, the LaTeX plug in for gedit, or perhaps plunge into Emacs.

[josephwright]

I've not tried it on Linux (perhaps I will one day), but I use it as my main editor on Windows and the Mac. Having taken a look at TeXshop, I can see the resemblance but much prefer the TeXworks approach. You'll get on best with it if you like quite a stripped-down approach (not too many buttons!), which is okay for some people but not everyone.

[Stefan Kottwitz]

Hi frabjous,

TeXworks is available as application bundle for Linux, that's a quick way to test it without need to compile it or to install it.

Stefan

[meho_r]

I think it's great. In fact, when they implement projects (master documents) it's very likely that it will become my main editor.

[localghost]

It has become the main editor on my both systems². For me it is the project with the most potential for development. In my opinion most other editors suffer from an overload of features which I don't really need. I prefer writing commands by hand rather than clicking on the mouse and search them in menus or icon bars. This has turned out to be much faster for me.

I managed successfully to compile it on my Linux system and I use the most recent version (r431). A copy in the bin sub-folder of my home directory was enough. Getting the code is very easy and I do an almost daily checkout of the SVN repository. The compilation process is described for several Linux distributions and in general is no big deal. The only issue is spell checking (no problem on Windows). Regarding Linux the documentation is not really clear in that point. I think that I will add this to the issues section of the project.

Two things that I miss are a kind of »Tabbed TeXing« and a minimal project management. At the moment TeXworks manages documents split up into several parts with an additional special comment line right at the beginning of the included files. But these are the only points on my wish list and they already have entries in the issues list. The project as a whole goes in the right direction.


Best regards
Thorsten

[frabjous]

Thanks for the input everyone.

If the spellchecking doesn't work in linux, that'd definitely be a turn off.

In general, I prefer typing commands rather than menu search, especially since I usually end up defining my own, though there are a few exceptions.

Does anyone know offhand if it does RegEx search and replace?

[frabjous]

I installed and am playing around with it. So far, I'm very impressed. It loads and compiles fast. To answer my own question, it does do RegEx find & replace. Spellcheck worked immediately for me in linux.

My only gripes are that the syntax highlighting doesn't seem to work well in general, and I can't find a way to customize the editor and syntax highlighting colors (--I prefer a dark theme--), which is, as noted above, something that was frustrating me with Kile, but I can live with it.

(I'm using the application bundle--thanks to Stefan for suggesting it..)

[josephwright]

The syntax highlighting is stored in one of the config files (config/syntax-patterns.txt), and is done using regex's. So it is not too hard to alter, especially if it is only the colours that you do not like.

[localghost]

[...] If the spellchecking doesn't work in linux, that'd definitely be a turn off. [...]

I would not give up so fast. Perhaps I did something wrong or missed something. I will check that. If all comes to nothing, there's always the possibility to report it as a bug. Remember that this is a very young project but well developed.

[frabjous]

I would not give up so fast. Perhaps I did something wrong or missed something. I will check that. If all comes to nothing, there's always the possibility to report it as a bug. Remember that this is a very young project but well developed.

Actually, as I already mentioned, spell-check worked for me when I installed without having to do anything special. Perhaps it's only certain languages that have trouble. I hope you can get it working.

The syntax highlighting is stored in one of the config files (config/syntax-patterns.txt), and is done using regex's. So it is not too hard to alter, especially if it is only the colours that you do not like.

Actually, my problems with syntax highlighting were more than just color preferance. Entire lines would be the wrong color if there was any command in them, and sometimes a color changed inappropriately in the middle of a word!. At times, nothing would be highlighted in an entire document for reasons I couldn't explain. However, this was the version used in the Application Bundles, which is quite early (r406), which I had been using on my laptop. I've just now installed, from source, the newest revision (r432) on my work computer, and it doesn't have those problems. I'll try it on my laptop when I get home.

I looked at syntax-patterns.txt and it does look easy to alter. But there is still no option for changing the primary editor and text colors. As I mentioned, I prefer a dark theme (e.g., white or light gray text on a blue background) I think there's already an issue on google project page for support for this, which I've voted for, so hopefully it'll get done.

I admit a tabbed interface would be nice, and master/sub-document settings, but these aren't big deals to me. I know it's an early project, so I'm very optomistic about it.

BTW, Would it be appropriate to have a TeXworks subforum here? I mean, if "WinShell" and "Scientific Author" get their own forums, surely TeXworks should make the cut....?