Robert McNees
LaTeX friends!
I’m looking for a modern and native (*not* electron) mac OS text editor that might take the place of textmate in my latex workflow.
I'm hoping to find something with existing bundles / scripts / extensions comparable to textmate’s LaTeX bundle. The great "Watch Document" feature works so much better than “latexmk -pvc”.
Any recs? I feel like the pickings are slim. When a nice native editor has any LaTeX support it's usually just syntax highlighting and a basic build script.
Charlie Stross
@mcnees Have you tried BBEdit? It's only been around since 1990 or thereabouts, so predates textmate by a *long* time, but has been actively ported to macOS and upgraded regularly …
Robert McNees
@cstross You know, I have been looking at it, and it might be the one. There are a few things I’m having trouble with, like it getting it to save on change of focus (I think this requires a script??). But for reliability it sounds like it can't be beat.
Robert McNees
@cstross (And thanks for the suggestion!)
David Zaslavsky
@mcnees As a "side-channel" suggestion, have you looked into Typst? It aims to be a LaTeX replacement which is faster and easier to use, and it natively supports incremental compilation and watching source documents and so on. It doesn't have the benefit of LaTeX's huge library of packages, but for the basic stuff it seems pretty solid.
This may or may not be a practical thing for you depending on how much you're tied to specific LaTeX classes and packages.
Robert McNees
@diazona It's a nice suggestion, and I've been meaning to give it a try. I think I'm pretty tied in to packages it doesn't support (extensive use of tikz/pgf, for instance), and of course there's submitting to the arXiv. But maybe somewhere down the road!
Greg Whitehead
@mcnees I use emacs, but I don't think that's what you're looking for.
There are some more IDE-like apps around, like TeXworks, but that's probably not what you're looking for either. I even (just now) found a new one, Compositor, that looks pretty nice https://compositorapp.com
Joel LeBlanc
@mcnees for LaTeX I use TexShop and for general purpose text editing BBEdit. You may also like Zed.
Good luck
Incognitim
Marc Palmer
@mcnees I don’t know about the LaTex specifics but worth taking a look at Panic’s Nova. I use it as my non-Xcode text editor now.
Robert McNees
@marcpalmer Trying it right now (was already using it for web stuff).
Robert McNees
@fbobraga Thanks for the rec. It’s fun, I’ve tried it before, but it never fit comfortably into the way I use LaTeX. In any case, I’m really looking for a Mac native text editor.
Low Rank Jack
@mcnees
On Mac OS, I'm happy with Emacs + Auctex mode + LSP (for completion ala overleaf), and compile with pdflatex or latexmk in background, viewing the pdf evolving live in the pdf viewer Skim, with forward and backward search between source and pdf. Take a bit of time to configure tho.
Robert McNees
@lowrankjack Essentially the setup I am going for, I just don't want to use emacs or vim.
I can cobble together something like it with Nova or BBEdit, but nothing I put together feels as snappy as my textmate setup. Maybe I just have to put in a little more effort.
Arno Appenzeller
@mcnees have you tried https://www.texifier.com/
Robert McNees
@arno_app Apparently I have! Downloaded it yesterday to take a look. But when I start it, I get a message saying my demo expired back in April 2022. I guess I installed it in a pandemic haze and forgot to ever try it?
Robert McNees
@arno_app (Thanks for the rec!)
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