Hi everybody,
This is just to briefly introduce myself, and to provide some information about a new contribution to the LaTeX editor family.
My name is Michelle, I am a physicist/neuroscientist and work for the French CNRS. Being a happy 20+ years user of LaTeX, I thought I give something back to the community by programming my very own LaTeX editor, entitled cyWriter. You can check it out on my website:
http://www.newscienceportal.com/WLSD/OS ... /index.php
I know that the restriction to OSX will be viewed by many as bad, but many scientists use Macs for their work, and the availability of LaTeX editors on this platform is - still - pretty sparse.
Now, cyWriter itself is, so far, not more than a proof of a little concept of mine, and I hope to get some feedback and, maybe, interest from the community to develop it to a decent application. The core idea is real-time and minimalist GUI, as I came to appreciate the power of LaTeX as a not-menu driven way to professionally format documents. Why not taking this power to the extreme?
As being said, cyWriter is in an early beta-test, and I used it successfully for my first professional book and my habilitation thesis (both some 400+ pages with equations and hundreds of figures), as well as several papers. The layout is classic, (left panel editing, right panel preview) only that the preview is updated in real-time, thus providing a LaTeX experience slightly different to other editors. Moreover, the document preamble was stripped off the actual document, so that cyWriter can be used by not-LaTeX-experienced people, thus hopefully giving the great LaTeX experience to people outside our community. Finally, cyWriter employs the concept of projects allowing to split apart big projects, but without the need of a master document with includes. I am not sure yet if this concept is stable, as it conflicts a bit with LaTeX own philosophy. So far, it worked fine, but this is just my - biased - opinion.
It would be great if the one or another could check it out, and provide some feedback and suggestions, or even interest in supporting the further development of this idea. cyWriter is provided for free as a binary for Mac OSX. It should run straight out of the box (given a valid TexLive or MacTex installation).
Thanks a lot for your interest!
Michelle
Others ⇒ Introducing cyWriter
Re: Introducing cyWriter
Hello Michelle,
thank you for the development of cyWriter. I'm in search for a distraction-free latex compiler for ages. Moreover, I was also searching for one which allows night vision, black background and white (or green) fonts ! So cyWriter will definitely my choice.
Some early remarks (after one day use). I regret the latex syntax does not use other colors, as in texshop for example. Highlighting of end brackets is more than a useful tool when you use multiple in brackets expressions. Commands in blue to understand they are not part of the text, etc etc. So for future development, I would really like to see these features implemented.
Other nice features I can suggest :
- double-click on a word in the pdf side leads you to the word in the tex file.
- Auto-completion is sometimes useful.
- A navigation pane with sections (for a long integrated document it is very very useful)
Moreover, I have not found how to compile my bib file, is bibtex not supported ? For the moment I have to switch to texshop to compile my bibliography, I would prefer to use only cyWriter.
More to come when I'll get more use of cyWriter, but already congrats for the program !
JF
thank you for the development of cyWriter. I'm in search for a distraction-free latex compiler for ages. Moreover, I was also searching for one which allows night vision, black background and white (or green) fonts ! So cyWriter will definitely my choice.
Some early remarks (after one day use). I regret the latex syntax does not use other colors, as in texshop for example. Highlighting of end brackets is more than a useful tool when you use multiple in brackets expressions. Commands in blue to understand they are not part of the text, etc etc. So for future development, I would really like to see these features implemented.
Other nice features I can suggest :
- double-click on a word in the pdf side leads you to the word in the tex file.
- Auto-completion is sometimes useful.
- A navigation pane with sections (for a long integrated document it is very very useful)
Moreover, I have not found how to compile my bib file, is bibtex not supported ? For the moment I have to switch to texshop to compile my bibliography, I would prefer to use only cyWriter.
More to come when I'll get more use of cyWriter, but already congrats for the program !
JF