Decision Guidance ⇒ Best editor for Debian.

[jestinjoy]

Hi,

I am new to Latex.I tried many editors. The one which I found most helpful is Texlipse, the eclipse addon. But the problem with that is, it takes more RAM. I have some questions for the experience community members.

1) Is there anything like official text editor.
2) Which is the best editor, considering it has automatic code completion and inline help support( something I found really helpful in texlipse, (help popup) ).
3)Whether texmaker available for Debian. If yes from where could I get it?
4)How to install Latex fonts. Is there any general way?

[frabjous]

Wikipedia actually has a fairly useful breakdown of the features of different TeX editors here. Might be worth a look.

It seems you might both heavy duty features and low RAM usage, which is a hard combination to find. You might consider Kile, which definitely does code completion; not exactly sure what you have in mind with inline help, but it does have a suggestion feature which might be what you have in mind.

1) Is there anything like official text editor.

Official in what sense, and official for what? Debian? I doubt Debian has an official text editor, but your Desktop Environment probably has a default editor, e.g., Kate or Kwrite for KDE, or gedit for GNOME. Gedit has a fairly nice LaTeX plugin. Kate is fine, but you're probably better off moving up to Kile, which is based on Kate.

I suppose some people might claim that all GNU/linux systems should consider emacs their "official editor", which of course has the AucTeX extension. I don't have a lot of experience with this personally, but I'm sure it's quite powerful. (Of course, others would argue instead for the vim LaTeX suite.)

Then again, texlive ships with TeXworks, so some might argue that's the official editor for TeXlive. TeXworks is fairly lightweight and easy to use, but might not have the features you're looking for.

But really, pick what you want.

Which is the best editor, considering it has automatic code completion and inline help support

Kile is my first suggestion for you, but try the others too. This is a very personal decision. Why not try all of them (at least the free ones) and decide for yourself? Linux is all about choice.

Whether texmaker available for Debian. If yes from where could I get it?

Definitely. In Ubuntu, which is based on Debian, you can simply type into a console:

sudo apt-get install texmaker

That may or may not work with Debian, depending on what repositories you've got set up. But in any case, there's a .deb package file you can download here. (There's one there for 64 bit systems and one for 32 bit systems.)

4)How to install Latex fonts. Is there any general way?

How did you install LaTeX? If you installed the texlive-full Debian package for TeXlive 2009, you should already have all the free LaTeX fonts available on CTAN set up and ready to use in LaTeX. (If you want those same fonts available for other programs, you could probably follow the instructions here.) Personally, however, I found having such a long list of files cluttering up the font selection list in other programs annoying.

[meho_r]

Just to add to the list another great editor: TeXMakerX. It is based on Texmaker and very similar to it, but with some great extra functionalities.

[localghost]

There's no best editor in general. There's only the editor that is best for you. This discussion is purely academic.


Best regards and welcome to the board
Thorsten

[jestinjoy]

Ya the word best is somewhat relative and differs from people to people.

1) Official in the sense that it comes with the latex distribution. Like the texworks comes with Miktex.

2) What I mean by inline help is that from the editor I could easily look up the latex documentation. For example in texlipse when we move to one keyword it shows a popup giving information( what is it and how to use it) about that keyword. Since Latex supports a lot of keywords, it would be of great help to the beginners. Whether any editor have that feature?

[Telofy]

I can recommend Geany and, of course, Vim. Geany is not a specialized LaTeX editor, and I haven’t tried the LaTeX plug-in it provides, but nonetheless it has proved ideally suited for various kinds of programming and writing tasks.

My usual setup is to have Evince, showing the PDF, on one half of my screen and Geany on the other. (I use the titling window manager xmonad.)

Have fun,
Telofy

[frabjous]

Geany is a nice lightweight editor. Very good for older hardware.

There's a patched version of Evince out there that will support SyncTeX foward/reverse searches with geany. Google it and ye shall find it. (I think you should also be able to set up forward/reverse search with Okular pretty easily too.)

[runbei]

A thought on editors:

I would never use an editor that didn't let me customize the keyboard shortcuts for all editing functions. Kile and TexMaker, for example, will let you assign some menu options and LaTeX entries to keys, but not word-wrangling functions.

This is why I'm trying to set up jEdit with the optional latex-tools plug-in. I haven't been able to get the plug-in to work - because I'm a LaTeX newbie and specifying where the various LaTex compiling and PDF-generating files are located is something I need to root around and discover.

I'm using Linux Mint 9, and jEdit is the best I've found (caveat: I have no experience with Vim, Emacs, etc.).

There's a LaTeX macro bundle for jEdit that looks pretty darn impressive, and it's easy to install. Find it here.

Don't want to make your heart stop, or anything, but I've edited long EECS doctoral theses in MS Word - it can save surprisingly clean text files. Still, a bit scary, hence my search for a true text editor with customizable keyboard. I'm old, very old, and still attached to WordStar-style keys-only editing.

[frabjous]

I couldn’t stand jEdit the few minutes I played around with it. It seemed ugly, not very feature-rich and took forever to load. But of course, this is a highly personal matter, and tastes differ widely.

What do you mean by "text wrangling functions"? From what I remember, every function, including user defined ones, can be assigned whatever hotkey you want in Kile. I don't have it installed right now, however, since I've mainly been using gedit, which is fully customizable in this direction with the right plugins.

However, you should also consider using AutoKey to define keyboard shortcuts that are neutral between editors.

You should be able to discover where your files are with a combination of kpsewhich, kpsepath, etc., and related linux/Unix tools like which, locate, etc. Try running each of these from a terminal with --help following it to learn how it works.

[runbei]

This is very cool information - you might even say Frabjous day! Or Callooh! Callay! Thanks so much. I've copied your post and will check the alternatives. I had no idea you could customize Kile and gedit, the latter with plugins. I'd love to know which plugin to use.

Re "text-wrangling functions," I mean mainly block functions. See sci-fi writer Robert Sawyer's essay on WordStar. I've witnessed the devolution of word processing apps from WordStar through WordPerfect DOS to Word. WP DOS was very cool but didn't "think like" a writer.

Followup: Alas, there is no gedit plug-in for full keyboard configuration. Also, Kile offers only LaTeX and menu shortcuts, but no edit/nav keys. And AutoKey requires Python scripts - no indication if you can set keyboard actions this way; and a non-issue in my case since I won't learn Python to execute WordStar commands. (In Word, OpenOffice, and WordPerfect you can record edit/nav operations and quickly assign them to the keyboard; some keyboard functions are directly reassignable using a table).

LyX lets you reassign a ton of edit/nav functions. It's look better and better.

Really a shame, as I would love to use Kile or TexMaker or TexMakerX.