Maybe I'm missing the point, but what about Emacs? There are versions for most operating systems, and emacs+auctex is surely the editing system of choice for any TeX-based system.
-Alasdair
Hi Kip,The Book will not be "tied" to an editor. However, one goal of the book is to be accessible to absolute newbies for whom the TeX-vs-editor distinction will be a turn-off. A complete newbie system should include an editor/environment. The book will be arranged in a way that the two are not coupled, and those with some TeX or other technical background can easily ignore Npp.
On Sun, 14 Aug 2011 15:16:58 -0600, Kip Warner <kip@thevertigo.com> wrote:
As some of you may know, I'm working on a professional introductory book
for learning ConTeXt. Part of the philosophy of this book is to be as
self-contained as possible, so we'll be using a preferred editor.
Hey Idris. I think writing a book is a great idea and much needed. I
don't believe that tying it to a specific editor though is neither
necessary nor a good idea.
Wow, that would be great if we got tens of millions of users to buy the Book :D :D :D
Not one editor/ide out there is ideal for ConTeXt (including bidi editing
and other user-friendly configurability). The best balance I could find is
Notepad++ (Npp), and that's what I'm going with.
The problem with Npp is that the tens of millions of users out there
Well, most people using Linux have some technical facility, so they can configure their own editors.
running operating systems like Ubuntu will not be able to use Notepad++
since it is written only for Windows.
That is actually one option I'm considering. In any case.
It might be better to decouple the
editor from the information on ConTeXt itself and perhaps offer editor
specific integration information in an appendix.
I did look at gedit, but for the current vision I have for introducing ConTeXt to non-technical folks it does not work.
You'll find that Gedit,
Actually, I spent months checking for a better candidate than Npp, experimenting with just about everything I could get my hands on. On balance Npp got the best score on all the benchmarks I set. That's not to say I wouldn't prefer something better, but that decision is done, only to be revisited if something really AMAZING happens in the next few months.
WinEdt would really have been be my ideal choice -- but the lack of unicode, bidi is just a non-starter. TeXWorks has a long way to go, and although I'm a fan of Qt its open-type implementation is buggy; so some Arabic-monospaced fonts don't show up correctly.Syntax highlighting is only a small part of what we're doing with Npp. Otherwise, just the user-defined dialog of Npp would be sufficient. Click-and-tag, tooltips ... these make for real user-friendliness.
for instance, is very easy to write syntax highlighting for.
Thanks for the criticism and
Best wishes
Idris
--
Professor Idris Samawi Hamid, Editor-in-Chief
International Journal of Shīʿī Studies
Department of Philosophy
Colorado State University
Fort Collins, CO 80523
___________________________________________________________________________________
If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to the Wiki!
maillist : ntg-context@ntg.nl / http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context
webpage : http://www.pragma-ade.nl / http://tex.aanhet.net
archive : http://foundry.supelec.fr/projects/contextrev/
wiki : http://contextgarden.net
___________________________________________________________________________________