Slashdot Mirror

Also, I think TexShop is the best LaTex editor.

"Some people think Buckingham Palace a fine building." (Nicholas Freeling)

I tries some for Windows, and they universally suck, IMHO.

AquaMacs (Emacs for Macs) works perfectly for LaTeX, as it does everywhere.

I can't believe how much time I wasted trying to use word for technical stuff when I was in school.

I run LaTeX courses and I hear this every time, especially from science students.

Learn Latex. I will save you life.

It will certainly save you time and effort. You might even get a life :-)

--
"Learn LaTeX?" Sure

http://aquamacs.org/

you forgot that emacs is on mac os also. that includes xemacs (mac os has an x server also) and aquamacs

Sounds like an idiot who can't setup a VM. I mean really: "I need to run Linux, whhaaa!!!!" - set up a VM, you utter muppet. What a total retard. And "emacs" OK fine, but does he not know about Coda?

He could have also just used http://aquamacs.org/ or fired up the terminal and used vi... I have done a fair bit of webdev on OS X. Works fine. Terrible article.

1. Those 3 "incompatible package managers" all came from Linux. There actually is an "incompatible [with Linux] package manager", the one developed by Apple for MacOS X applications. That's the one to use if you're deploying to OS X, otherwise just pick one from the "variety" that is Linux...
2. EMACS is built into the shell, open up the terminal application and type "emacs". Works like a charm...
3. There's a -wonderful- EMACS port to the Mac called Aquamacs. http://aquamacs.org/
4. Why build software that depends on the low-level differences between Linux and OS X? What's wrong with the POSIX set of standards for that level of application development. Color within the lines; -show me why for a Web app you have to go outside of the POSIX standards at that level.-
5. Buy a copy of Parallels or VMWare and install one (or more!!) distributions of Linux, or use BootCamp to dual-boot.
6. As far as the price of the hardware, you get what you pay for. My experience with Mac laptops is that they're a heluva lot more durable than machines from HP, Dell or Toshiba; ThinkPads have similar reliability (at similar higher price-points.)

The thing he seems to miss is that he could use VirtualBox to run Windows and Linux instances for testing. Who would assume you could run a ported version of something and get it to work exactly as it did under Linux?

Only an OS X system gives you the ability to easily try things natively on all three systems, since creating a hackintosh is not really supported.

As for Textmate sucking? Well I run Aquamacs. Perhaps he should do the same if he likes Emacs as I do for a primary text editor.

Honestly the whole thing comes off as someone that spent almost no effort whatsoever trying to learn the basics of the system he was on and is generally just a poorly informed rant placed here as red meat for the Apple Hater crowd.

I think Illustrator CS5 on OSX suffers from Cocoa, full stop. That API is a CPU hog. Even old Aqua Emacs is incredibly slow with Cocoa, much much slower than with Carbon.

...and only with programs that they want you to use...

Wait, what?! How do you people not get modded down for this blatant misinformation? There are absolutely no restrictions on what applications you can run on OSX, as evidenced by the vast selection of free and open source software available for it, much of it competing directly with apple products.

In case you're reading this, AC, it looks like the Aquamacs crew has released a preview version based on emacs23:

http://aquamacs.org/news.shtml#2.0p1

Aquamacs has a preview version based on 23, probably shortly to become a final...

They generally have a little nicer system integration than the stock emacs.

You can even get a shiny, aquafied version of GNU Emacs! http://aquamacs.org/.

I will say that Emacs takes more configuring than most modern single language IDEs. On the other hand, I've spent high multiples of the time I've spent on Emacs just trying to get some of Eclipses more popular plugins to work.

Get this one instead. It's updated reasonably often, and has thus far been rock stable here. It also comes with a bunch of packages included, but isn't configured into oblivion like Aquamacs.

A native Aqua GUI text editors for OSX with all the features of TextMate released with a GPL license-- I'd love to see it.

After recently getting a Mac, Aquamacs was my first major addition. It's Aqua, GPL, and is pretty much guaranteed to support a superset of features of any other text editor.

While I've used both vi and emacs, I tend to prefer vim. (Note: if I was stuck with just vi and not the extended features of vi, I would probably use emacs)

However, for those of you more comfortable with emacs, you should check out aquamacs. It's got some nice features specific to OS X.

Also, I don't really want to start a flame war, just point out the aquamacs link for those looking for a nicer emacs experience on OS X.

However, if you're in the humanities or so, your students will likely be unable to learn LaTeX in reasonable time. In that case, I'd recommend Papyrus from ROM Logicware, which is a very fast text processor that can deal with large documents. (Their web site is crap, but try the Papyrus demo!). There are alternative editors, but Papyrus seems like the fastest word processor to me. Also, it's available for different systems, not just for Macs, and they have cheap licenses, I think.

If you want Emacs for OS X you should check out Aquamacs. It has some good integration with OS X that can make your life easier.

For example it supports standard OS X keyboard shortcuts (in addition to standard Emacs bindings) and easily assign shortcuts to the iBook / PowerBook Fn key combos. You can access the OS X dictionary from the context menu, and use the services menu... etc. etc.

The parent points at another emacs port that looks pretty stale (it is talking about 10.2 & 10.3).

Aquamacs is an OS X port of Emacs that tries to conform to the OS X guidelines as closely as possible.

http://aquamacs.org

There are several decent releases of Emacs for OS X.

http://aquamacs.org/
http://home.att.ne.jp/alpha/z123/emacs-mac-e.html
http://bluebeard.org/software/emacs_osx/

And the lack of consistency with Meta keys is frustrating (on my Mac, Carbon Emacs uses command, the terminal uses option, but on other machines I have to fall back on Esc).