Text Editor

Although LaTeX can be edited using any text editor, the following programs have features such as syntax coloring and built-in previewing for LaTeX.

For more than one platform

TexMaker (Windows/Mac/Linux)

Very well designed free editor with buttons for compiling into dvi, ps, and pdf. Limited text coloring for different environments.

For Windows

WinEdt

Superb text editor for LaTeX. Highlights and colors text for the various environments. Matches parentheses, etc. Free trial for one month, then annoying popups start appearing, asking you to buy the program. For students the price is $30.

EditPad Lite

EditPad, free version. Excellent text editor for general purposes, not specific to LaTeX.

Notepad

This is standard on all Windows operating systems.

For Unix

For the department computers, probably the best choice is Emacs with AucTeX.

Emacs with AucTeX

Here are some very useful reference cards for Emacs and AucTeX commands.

To use AucTeX (and RefTeX), edit your .emacs file (you may not know it's there, but it is), for example with the shell command

emacs ~/.emacs &

and insert the lines

(require 'tex-site) 
(setq reftex-plug-into-AUCTeX t)
(add-hook 'LaTeX-mode-hook 'turn-on-reftex)

After this, AucTeX will automatically start up any time you use a TeX document.

For your home computer, you may need to download these packages.

Kile

Kile for KDE.

For Mac

Since Mac OS X is based on Unix, you can also use any of the above programs. You can download some of the UniX packages using Fink.

TeXShop

Freely available from http://www.uoregon.edu/~koch/texshop/texshop.html.

TextMate

In Spring 2008, UC Berkeley purchased a site license to TextMate, a multipurpose commercial text editor for Mac OS X. The site license may be downloaded from Software Central for free.

Aquamacs Emacs

This is a special version of GNU Emacs built for Mac OS X. It is currently under active development and has a lively email discussion group. It comes with Auctex, almost completely preconfigured and ready to go. It works well with the .pdf and .dvi viewers TeXniscope and Skim, and in particular can use pdfsync or synctex to synchronize fairly well between the source and typeset files. It is available at Versiontracker and also at http://aquamacs.org. Aquamacs emacs is configured to work with Skim as the default, and TeXniscope does not work properly on Intel macintoshes, so Skim is probably a better solution for most people. Skim is also a very good platform for presentations of pdf files created with TeX, for example using the beamer package. Note that the old synchronization technology based on the pdfsync package is now deprecated; synctex is much more robust. It use does not require loading any packages, just put \synctex=1 in the preamble of your TeX file. Note that although Skim is supposed to work with Aquamacs emacs "out of the box", the view command (bound to C-c C-v) will instead open Preview. To change this, put the following command in your .emacs file:

(setq TeX-output-view-style
     (quote (("^dvi$" "." "open -a TeXniscope %o")
     ("^pdf$" "." "/Applications/Skim.app/Contents/SharedSupport/displayline %n %o %b")))))