So, which TeX editor should I use?

A.N.Other · 6 Feb 2012 at 17:04

I'm just starting to write a thesis (yippee?). For my mid-term report, I did everthing in Word (+ EndNote for citations), which was a complete pain in the rear. For a more substantial document, I'm definitely interested in doing this in LaTeX.

So, the question is, what TeX editor is best in people's experience? Cross-OS would be a plus, but is not a specific requirement. Any other tips or things that would greatly improve ease of use? I'm going to be using BibTeX for the citations - anything particularly useful I should be looking out for there?

Cheers

!

A.N.Other · 8 Feb 2012 at 09:56

Bah, I'm aware TeX isn't that trendy, but still

There seem to be umpteen editors out there with the same functionality. Does anyone use one on a regular basis or have a good reason to avoid some of them?

namnoc · 8 Feb 2012 at 13:48

vi is now available on about every platform

What was your main problem with Word? I find that is you disable all of the automatic stuff it is pretty good.

A.N.Other · 8 Feb 2012 at 14:03

My main gripe with word is the functionality for internal referencing of figures, tables and citations, of which there will be many. The way it does this is extremely clunky, and every time you refresh lists of tables etc, it will re-write all links within the document, regardless of specific formats. This is most annoying when you have things that appear together (e.g. 'see Figures 1 and 2', which Word constantly rewrites as either 'see Figure 1, Figure 2' or 'see Figure 1, 2'.

JonJ678 · 8 Feb 2012 at 15:15

You'd probably have more success in the *nix forums. Or you may just trigger an argument about emacs vs vim. I tend to write everything in emacs, but I pretty much flipped a coin to choose between the two initially.

You could just use notepad if you want to of course. Anything capable of saving a plain text file will work. Vim and Emacs happen to be the big two when it comes to text editors.