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 or xemacs, and the AUC-TeX mode (AUC-TeX is available from CTAN, but emacs itself isn't). AUC-TeX 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.

Nedit is another free, programmable, editor available for Unix systems. An AUC-TeX-alike package for Nedit is available from CTAN.

MSDOS

There are several choices:

• TeXshell is a simple, easily-customisable environment, which can be used with the editor of your choice.
• Eddi4TeX (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 AUC-TeX under MSDOS.

Windows '9x, NT, etc.

Winedt, a shareware package, is highly spoken of. It provides a shell for the use of TeX and related programs, as well as a powerful and well-configured editor.

The 4AllTeX CDROM (see TeX CDROMs) contains another powerful Windows-based shell.

OS/2

Eddi4TeX works under OS/2; an alternative is epmtex, which offers an OS/2-specific 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 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.

alpha

systems/mac/support/alpha.tar.gz

auctex

support/auctex.tar.gz

epmtex

systems/os2/epmtex.tar.gz

latexmk

support/latexmk.tar.gz

nedit latex support

support/NEdit-LaTeX-Extensions.tar.gz

TeXshell

systems/msdos/texshell.tar.gz

TeXtelmExtel

systems/msdos/emtex-contrib/TeXtelmExtel.tar.gz

winedt

systems/win32/winedt/winedt32.exe