Question

I’m looking for a TeX environment for Mac OS, a bit like TeXnicCenter for windows. Any ideas? Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I use ii2 to manage LaTeX software for the back end and I have used both TextMate (it has a very nice LaTeX bundle) and Emacs (with Auctex) as front ends.

You can get a nice baked-in LaTeX experience in Emacs by using the Aquamacs distribution (I can’t use it because I have a non-english keyboard with no Aquamacs-specific mapping. This makes it impossible to use Aquamacs and the ‘@’ symbol at the same time for me).

More important than all of this, especially if you are embarking on a big project like a thesis, get the LaTeX Companion. It will save you tens to hundreds of hours over the course of a large project.

There are also the Mac-specific LaTeX authoring programs:

• TeXShop
• iTexMac2
• TeXMaker
• Lyx (this is somewhat “non-standard”, as it abstracts slightly over LaTeX and has its own file format, “.lyx”)
• Texmacs (this has the great feature of being written in Scheme)

There is a Mac-specific LaTeX back end called Mactex.