The best LaTex editor is Scientific Workplace version 5.5 by McKichan software. It is the best editor for mathematicians, for it offers in-place editing of mathematical formulas, you get what you mean. I tried a few of the LaTeX editors for OS X. TexMaker, TexWorks, TexShop and TextMate/BBEdit offer syntax highlighting and some additional features to edit single tex files. What I meant was a 'native' Mac editor. One of the many uberfancy apps only avalaible for Mac. LaTeX Editors/IDEs 54 answers I just purchased a Mac and I am trying to decide which TeX editor to use. The security preferences did not recognize TeXStudio or Texmaker which are the two I am most familiar with.
I want to write my final thesis using LaTeX, what should I do in order to be able to do that through Eclipse on a Mac OS X? If any another good editor exists, feel free to write your opinion on why using this instead of something else.
7 Answers
MacTeX is your friend! This contains the latest TeXLive distribution.
Personally, I edit using Aquamacs with AUCTeX and friends enabled.
José Figueroa-O'FarrillJosé Figueroa-O'FarrillThere are more integrated environments for editing Latex documents, but I'm happy with a good general-purpose text editor + a good PDF viewer + some scripts. One nice thing is that I don't need to learn that many different tools; I can use the same text editor for Latex files, programming, etc.
TextMate is fairly popular text editor for Mac OS X. It has a decent support for Latex, and it's easy to customise (e.g., you can define a keyboard shortcut that invokes a shell script that compiles your Latex document).
Preview (part of Mac OS X) is a good tool for previewing PDF files that you produce with pdflatex. My typical workflow:
First, open the source code in your text editor and open the PDF file in Preview (you can make this a bit more automatic by using some scripts). Leave both windows open.
Edit the document in your text editor and hit the keyboard shortcut that compiles the document. Then press cmd+tab to switch to Preview. It will notice that the file has changed and it'll reload the document automatically, without losing the current location.
In any case, download and install MacTex first to get started, as suggested in other answers. Among others, it'll provide all command-line tools such as 'pdflatex' that you will need.
Jukka SuomelaJukka SuomelaIf you like Eclipse, you can get the TeXlipse package, which adds LaTeX handling features to the IDE including:
- Syntax highlighting
- Document outline
- Code folding
- Templates
- Build support, also partial building
- Annotations for errors (while editing)
- Content assist (completion of commands and references)
- Easy navigation with F3
- Outline of the current file and the full project
- Spell checking
- Menu with common LaTeX math symbols
- BibTeX editor and BibTeX-support
- Line wrapping
- Table editor
- Support for several platforms (Windows, Linux, OS X)
I'd vote for a more lightweight text editor like Vim or Emacs, (Or their Mac-ified GUI equivalents listed above), or TextMate (Although I've never found the charm it seems to hold for others). But, lightweight vs. sumo is a matter of personal preference (And the size of your RAM).
Once again, MacTeX is the package you want to install LaTeX. After that, the editor you use is a matter of personal preference.
Kevin VermeerKevin VermeerFor those who use Mac OS X because it is Unix and integrates well with other unixes, fink provides a set of texlive packages. Just install fink, then use
at the command line.
I believe MacPorts also provides a set of TeX packages.
dmckeedmckeeI use MacVim for all my editing purposes, and naturally also for LaTeX. Together with the Vim-LaTeX plugin, it’s very powerful.
But of course it’s Vim and that’s not to everybody’s liking, and furthermore setting the Vim-LaTeX plugin up correctly is a bit of a hassle, in particular since the plugin by default maps a lot of keys to custom commands. On the one hand this is helpful for writing said commands, on the other hand it’s very annying when you actually want to use those commands. For example, by default you cannot easily write a quote mark (') and some other characters.
As mentioned at comments before, you can install the MacTeX distribution, using brew cask.
Latex On Mac
Just type brew cask install mactex in the terminal, installing cask before this.
Best Latex Editor For Mac Os X
You might also want to check out Cassiopeia for MacOSX (http://www.advanced-science.com/ProductsCassiopeia.html). It allows you to write your thesis comfortably without having to tinker around with LaTeX tags and finally generates LaTeX automatically when it comes to printing. This gives you both, a very efficient scientific word processing solution and LaTeXed output! It internally uses MathML Content Markup o represent your equations and has a bunch of other features that might or might not be of interest for you, e.g. an integrated plotting engine.