TeX-friendly editors and shells
There are good TeX-writing environments and editors for most
operating systems; some are described below, but this is only a
personal selection:
- Unix
- Try GNU emacs or xemacs, and
the AUCTeX
mode (AUCTeX is available from CTAN, but
emacs itself isn't). AUCTeX provides menu
items and control sequences for common constructs, checks syntax,
lays out markup nicely, lets you call TeX and drivers from
within the editor, and everything else like this that you can think
of. Complex, but very powerful.
- MSDOS
- There are several choices:
- TeXshell is a simple,
easily-customisable environment, which can be used with the editor
of your choice.
- Eddi4TeX (also shareware) is a
specially-written TeX
editor which features intelligent colouring, bracket matching,
syntax checking, online help and the ability to call TeX
programs from within the editor. It is highly customisable, and
features a powerful macro language.
You can also use GNU emacs and AUCTeX
under MSDOS.
- Windows '9x, NT, etc.
- Winedt, a shareware package,
is highly spoken of. It provides a shell for the use of TeX and
related programs, as well as a powerful and well-configured editor.
The 4AllTeX CDROM
(see TeX CDROMs) contains another
powerful Windows-based shell.
- OS/2
- Eddi4TeX works under OS/2; an alternative
is
epmtex, which offers an OS/2-specific shell.
- Macintosh
- The commercial Textures provides an excellent integrated
Macintosh environment with its own editor. More powerful still (as an
editor) is the shareware Alpha which is
extensible enough to let you perform almost any TeX-related job. It
works well with OzTeX.
Atari, Amiga and NeXT users also have nice environments. LaTeX
users who like make should try support/latexmk.tar.gz
There is another set of shell programs to help you manipulate
BibTeX databases.
- alpha
- systems/mac/support/alpha.tar.gz
- auctex
- support/auctex.tar.gz
- epmtex
- systems/os2/epmtex.tar.gz
- TeXshell
- systems/msdos/texshell.tar.gz
- TeXtelmExtel
- systems/msdos/emtex-contrib/TeXtelmExtel.tar.gz
- winedt
- systems/win32/winedt/winedt32.exe