Our question LaTeX Editors/IDEs is very popular, with close to 35k views as of Feb ’13. However, the answers vary a lot in terms of quality and the kinds of information they provide, which makes comparison harder than it would have to be. So I thought it might be nice to standardize the information available about every editor. Here’s what I’d propose to do:
- Compile a list of features, which will be present in every editor’s answer (Unicode, RTL support, platforms, ...). This will pretty much result in standard answer template.
- Create a sample document (~40 lines max) to take screen shots of in each editor, so the screen shots will be really comparable.
- Have users here “sign up” for editors, i.e. one or a few users will be “responsible” for a specific editor that they are experienced in using. If the editor receives major updates, it’d be great if they could also update the answer accordingly.
Each of these should be one CW answer here, I guess, which I’ll create; discussions can take place in the respective comments.
Sometimes, we get questions like “Which LaTeX editor can make fried eggs?” – in these cases, we could just create a call for action here (another answer as a to-do-list probably) and have the editor caretakers add the feature “Make fried eggs” to their respective editor’s answer. All the information neatly collected in one place.
There is, of course, the great Wikipedia article Comparison of TeX editors, and we should try to avoid just duplicating that here. Instead, let’s take advantage of our format: screen shots are definitely a plus; we can me a little more subjective than Wikipedia; we can add a few words to a bare yes or no, if necessary; and, while I don’t know how up-to-date that article is, it might be easier for us to stay up-to-date.
Important: Let’s wait with updating the actual answers until we’ve pretty much sorted everything out here.
Feel free to edit all answers without prior discussion. I think most things won’t be very controversial, since it’s usually not an either-or situation. If the feature list or sample document get too extensive, we can always try to boil them down later.
Note Any discussion comments that get 'actioned' will be removed periodically so the key points stay clear.
:)