Others ⇒ Essential LaTeX editor features?

[sbrudzinski]

Dear LaTeX Community,

As a part of my master thesis, I'll be developing an Open Source LaTeX editor that supports remote collaboration. As a first part of my work, I want to prepare a lightweight tool, with few, most important features. Since I don't use LaTeX a lot myself, here's where I could use Your help!

What features do you find absolutely crucial in your LaTeX editor? Is there anything that you find annoying in existing editors, that could use an improvement? Is there any feature that popular LaTeX editors lack?

I'll be grateful for any information!

Best regards,
Sebastian Brudzinski.

[Johannes_B]

Hi Sebastion, welcome to our community.

As a software developer, what do you find helpful in regard of your favourite IDE? What do your friends and colleagues find helpful?

It's a thing oof personal preference. There are two main distributions (TeX Live and MikTeX) and both ship out with a slim and lightweight editor called TeXworks. A few buttons to save, open, copy, paste and compile, nothing more. Nothing to distract the user. A pdf-viewer is built in.

Code markup, brace matching, personally, i don't need more as long as i have vim.

What do you mean by remote? Where will the file be located? Where will it be compiled? How are wrighting right administrated? Is there any failsafe to not overwrite by accident the work of a fellow worker?

There are LaTeX-IDEs with lots of features and menus and buttons and stuff to distract a new user and leading to Moorhuhn-mouse-activity.

You can find a little overview of feature along with screenshots of different editors on TeX.SX.

[sbrudzinski]

Hello Johannes

Thanks for the reply. It's definitely a thing of personal preference. I believe it also depends if you are a more technical user or an opposite. What I'm trying to do is to collect the common element - features that must be in a LaTeX editor.

Support for remote collaboration is not well-defined yet, so currently it's just an idea that needs to be given a thought and some research. It's planned that users could store a file on some of the popular cloud storage solutions (like Dropbox). There will definitely be a need for some kind of version control, but there already are solutions/editors that allow remote collaboration of many users and it works, so it's definitely something that can be achieved.

Thanks once again, and everyone else - feel free to speak your mind

Best regards,
Sebastian Brudzinski.

[sbrudzinski]

Hello

Just a little update:
The editor I've mentioned in the first post and worked on during last months has got its first release. It's nothing big yet and can still be buggy, but you are most welcome to give it a try:
https://github.com/sebbrudzinski/Open-LaTeX-Studio

Of course, I'll be also grateful for any feedback from You.

Best regards,
Sebastian Brudziński.

[Johannes_B]

To be honest, i never used any cloud stuff.

But i made a bit of advertisement.