Decision Guidance ⇒ A look at 8+ free LaTeX editors

[frabjous]

I wrote my impressions on 8 LaTeX editors in this blog post today on the PhilTeX blog. The included editors are TeXworks, TexMaker(x), Kile, Gedit with the gedit-latex-plugin, Gummi, Lyx, Vim and Emacs, which are all available for linux (though six of these are available for other OSes too). Some honorable mentions are also mentioned. Comments welcome, here or there.

[gmedina]

Hi, frabjous

I haven't finished reading the whole article; in fact, I've read only the introduction and your description of TeXworks and I noticed this:

...it [TeXworks] does not offer features such as automatic code completion...

But TeXworks does offer automatic code completion! Type

\begin{ta

for example and then press the "Tab" key.

[frabjous]

Thanks for the correction. I tried with \begin{document} and got nothing, and couldn't find any documentation on it. I'll change things. I'm still a bit mystified though. Is this covered in the manual. What is that dot it sticks in at the end?

(OK, answered my own questions; the dot is a placeholder you get to with Ctrl-Tab. Nice features, which I should have known about. Oh, well, learn new things every day!)

[gmedina]

Those dots (there are two in this case) are place holders; pressing Ctrl+Tab you can go to the next "dot" and pressing Shift+Ctrl+Tab you can go to the previous "dot".

These features are explained on Section 4.6 Auto-completion of this manual.

[frabjous]

Yep, figured that out on my own. Thanks. This is a very useful tip.

[gmedina]

Regarding this:

...I tried with \begin{document} and got nothing...

I did a quick search on the completion files and apparently there's nothing for \begin{document}...\end{document}; however, the manual (See link in my previous reply) explains how to define own keywords for auto-completion.

[frabjous]

Yeah, I gathered that. I suppose \begin{document} would typically be covered by a template anyway, so perhaps it wasn't a good tester.

[pizzocaro]

Nice article! A very interesting reading.

I will try Gummi, I am curious to try its live preview feature while coding Tikz pictures.

By the way, the gedit latex plugin allow you to complete citation (write \cite{ and call the code completion with Ctrl + Space). There is space for improvement though: for example it does not work with \citep and similar (nor \vref, \autoref, \cref, etc..) and I believe it has trouble if the bibliography file is called with an absolute path. On the other hand in recent versions it works with multi-file projects.

[frabjous]

Thanks for the tip about the gedit-latex-plugin. Can't believe I missed that. Looks like I didn't do my homework as well as I thought!

I don't think I've ever tried gummi with TikZ. Let us know how it works, if you don't mind.

[pizzocaro]

Thanks for the tip about the gedit-latex-plugin. Can't believe I missed that. Looks like I didn't do my homework as well as I thought!

To be honest I had to check if the citation completion works (I usually do not use the basic commands \cite and \ref). Moreover sometimes it is automatic and gedit suggests you the entry as you type, sometimes it requires you to use ctrl + space...

I don't think I've ever tried gummi with TikZ. Let us know how it works, if you don't mind.

I gave gummi a quick try, only to check it.
It works and the TikZ picture is correctly live-updated.
Drawing "live" is surely a nice feature, but the limitations of gummi make me doubtful.
Typing, while the TikZ commands are not complete, gummi highlights with red a lot of text. This is quite annoying.