UK TeX FAQ -- question 55

### 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 bundle (available from CTAN). 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.

  Many who fail to find the versions of emacs attractive, prefer vim, a highly configurable editor (also available for Windows and Macintosh systems). Many plugins are available to support the needs of the (La)TeX user, including syntax highlighting, calling TeX programs, auto-insertion and -completion of common (La)TeX structures, and browsing LaTeX help. The scripts auctex.vim and bibtex.vim seem to be the most common recommendations.

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

MSDOS
  TeXshell is a simple, easily-customisable environment, which can be used with the editor of your choice.

  Eddi4TeX (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.

  Both emacs and vim are available in versions for Windows systems.

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.

  Vim is available for use on Macintosh systems.

Atari, Amiga and NeXT users also have nice environments. LaTeX users looking for make-like facilities should try latexmk.

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