I’ve hap­pily used WinEdt for all my LaTeX edit­ing for about 15 years and I’ve encour­aged my whole research team to use it. But I’m tired of prob­lems with WinEdt that take up my time. I reg­u­larly have requests for help from one of my research team because some­thing in WinEdt is not work­ing prop­erly — such as pdf syn­chro­niza­tion prob­lems, or it is using an old ver­sion of Mik­TeX that no longer updates, or that it has switched to using another pdf viewer with­out warn­ing. These aren’t that hard to fix, but they shouldn’t happen. When a coau­thor at another uni­ver­sity has a request for help, it is much more dif­fi­cult. If a new per­son joins our research team, there is always a has­sle get­ting WinEdt con­fig­ured for their use. Jeromy Anglim has a nice post on con­fig­ur­ing WinEdt 6.0, but it should work nicely with­out need­ing this sort of configuration.

I tried TeXnic­Cen­ter for a while, the most pop­u­lar free­ware LaTeX edi­tor for Win­dows. V1.0 is very clut­tered and messy which dri­ves me crazy. V2.0 is an improve­ment, but is very buggy and progress is so slow that I’ll be dead before it is released! It was announced in 2008, but there still isn’t a beta ver­sion. The last alpha 3 release was nearly a year ago.

So I’ve been look­ing around for another LaTeX edi­tor, and after try­ing a hand­ful of alter­na­tives, dis­cov­ered TeXs­tu­dio (pre­vi­ously called Tex­Mak­erX) which seems very clean and sim­ple, but does every­thing I need. The fol­low­ing fea­tures are great:

• Colour syn­tax coding;
• Inte­grated pdf viewer with sync­ing in both directions;
• Tree view of doc­u­ment struc­ture auto­mat­i­cally cre­ated and high­light­ing my posi­tion in the document;
• Auto-​​completion of stan­dard commands;
• Auto-​​fill of \ref commands;
• Auto­matic detec­tion of mas­ter document;
• Auto­mat­i­cally works with Mik­TeX with no con­fig­u­ra­tion required;
• Code fold­ing;
• Error list with auto­matic link­ing to the rel­e­vant line of the document;
• Regex search and replace facility;
• One click build process for LaTeX documents;
• Built-​​in spelling checker;
• Built-​​in thesaurus;
• Text analy­sis includ­ing word counts;
• It works on Win­dows, Unix/​Linux, BSD and Mac OS X;
• Free­ware.

For begin­ners, there are lots of but­tons to assist with fonts, math­e­mat­i­cal sym­bols, etc. There are also wiz­ards for fig­ures and tables. I won’t use these but they might be use­ful to new LaTeXers.

It is not as pow­er­ful as WinEdt in it’s macro capa­bil­ity, and it only han­dles LaTeX (so no good if you want to use TeX, Con­TeXt, or some other vari­ant). But for the sort of work I do, it has all the facil­i­ties I need. I think it will also lead to far fewer requests for help.

The only cus­tomiz­ing I’ve done is to map F3 to the “Find next” so it matches other soft­ware I use. By default, F3 is linked to YAP for dvi files, but I never use dvi files any­way. I also turned off ToolTip-​​Help which I found annoying.

One bug I have found is that Bib­TeX is not always called when it should be. It is easy enough to man­u­ally run Bib­TeX, but it would be nice if the need to do so was detected more reliably.

I’m not sure if TeXs­tu­dio will be my LaTeX edi­tor for the next 15 years, but I’ll use it as my main LaTeX edi­tor unless some­thing bet­ter comes along, and I will encour­age my research team and coau­thors to use it too.

Related Posts:

• Get­ting a LaTeX sys­tem set up on a PC
• Syn­chro­niz­ing WinEdt and pdf files
• Using TeXs­tu­dio with SumatraPDF
• Con­vert­ing eps to pdf
• Online col­lab­o­ra­tive writing