TeX-friendly editors and shells

There are good TeX-writing environments and editors for most operating systems; some are described below, but this is only a personal selection:

Unix

Try GNU emacs, and the AUCTeX mode (support/auctex). This provides menu items and control sequences for common constructs, checks syntax, lays out markup nicely, lets you call TeX and drivers from within the editor, and everything else like this that you can think of. Complex, but very powerful.

VMS

An lsedit mode for editing TeX source is available from TUG as TeXniques 1, VAX Language-Sensitive Editor, by Kent MacPherson (1985).

MS-DOS

There are several choices:

• The (shareware) 4AllTeX workbench (systems/msdos/4alltex) provides a very comprehensive environment written in 4DOS which lets you access most TeX-related software in a friendly way. You can choose your own editor; something such as QEdit or Brief is suitable. This whole package is available in easy-to-use form on CD-ROM from TeX user groups.
• TeXshell (systems/msdos/texshell) is a simpler, easily-customisable environment, which can be used with the editor of your choice.
• Eddi4TeX (systems/msdos/e4t; also shareware) is a specially-written TeX editor which features intelligent colouring, bracket matching, syntax checking, online help and the ability to call TeX programs from within the editor. It is highly customisable, and features a powerful macro language.

You can also use GNU emacs and AUCTeX under MS-DOS.

Windows

Your best public domain bet is probably to use MicroEmacs as an editor and control centre for TeX programs. The gTeX package (systems/msdos/gtex) comes with MicroEmacs ready to go, integrated with TeX, previewer, dvips and GhostScript.

TeXtelmExtel (systems/msdos/emtex-contrib/TeXtelmExtel) is a Shell for emTeX or WTeX and related tools under Windows. It includes a simple multiple-document editor, a built-in spelling checker, automatic OEM/ANSI character conversion, user-definable point-and-click Templates, support for the forward and inverse search mechanism of DVI driver for Windows and for automatic font generation. Besides the predefined tools, up to 10 user-defined tools can be set up.

On a PC with large enough memory, a version of GNU emacs, that will run under Windows, is available; thus you can also use AUCTeX under Windows.

Y&Y's commercial (and high-quality) Windows previewer, dviwindo, can be used as a good TeX shell, calling programs such as TeX, drivers, and editors (Y&Y supply the public domain PE, and recommend the commercial Epsilon) from customisable menus (see commercial vendors for details of Y&Y).

Scientific Word is a WYSIWYG editing program, strong on maths, which uses LaTeX for output (see vendors for contact address).

OS/2

Eddi4TeX works under OS/2; look also at systems/os2/epmtex for a specific OS/2 shell.

Macintosh

The commercial Textures provides an excellent integrated Macintosh environment with its own editor. More powerful still (as an editor) is the shareware Alpha (systems/mac/support/alpha) which is extensible enough to let you perform almost any TeX-related job. It works well with OzTeX.

There is another set of shell programs to help you manipulate BibTeX databases.