Best LaTeX editor for Windows

Question

I'm looking for a good LaTeX editor for Windows!

Answer 1

I've had decent experience with LyX, but it has some quirks.

Answer 2

I use WinEdt. It has helpful toolbar which contains many symbols as well. What is useful for me is one button configurable compilation and viewing feature. Also text coloring makes work more convenient.

Answer 3

I use TeXNic Center and it is quite good. No complaints.

Scientific Workplace is good too but its a commercial product so I prefer the free one.

Answer 4

Texmaker has served me well before

Answer 5

Come on people, you can't mention (La)TeX editors without bringing up emacs!

Answer 6

I recommend Led for novice users and vim for more advanced.

Answer 7

You ask like there was a choice other than Emacs. Weird.

Answer 8

Before I knew better I wrote a quite large document using Notepad. Now I use Scite for all my editing, including LaTeX. It has color coding and makes it possible to compile from within the tool, but no fancy toolbars I'm afraid.

Answer 9

Although others have joked about it, the AucTeX mode in emacs really is one of the most powerful TeX editors around. preview-latex is something of a revelation.

Answer 10

I found a greate free tool called LaTeXPiX that presents you with a canvas and drawing tools that allow you to design figures. You can preview the figures in PDF and then output to LaTeX code when you are done.

Answer 11

I always liked LaTexEditor (now known as MeWa) for it's simplicity: http://www.meshwalk.com/latexeditor/

Answer 12

If you use windows, WinEDT is probably the only way to go and well worth the registration price (it is not freeware, unlike TeXShop for the mac).

A great advantage of WinEDT is its support for multiple files. I wish TeXShop had it.

Answer 13

No-one seems to bring up TeXmacs, so I will.

Answer 14

If you use Eclipse for your programming, you might want to take a look at Texlipse. Works well for me.

Answer 15

BaKoMa TeX is the only editor that gives you a true realtime preview. On one side you have the source and on the other the compiled LaTeX document, so it is not just a preview but actually the real thing. Any change to the source will immedently be visible in the preview (even if the there are errors, e.g. if the math environment has not been closed yet). You can also edit in the preview, the cursors in the source and the preview are synchronized. For me this is a killer feature and I would never go back to an editor without these realtime capabilities. It also works with nearly all LaTeX packages and the LaTeX system itself is excellent as well.

Unfortunately it is not free and only available on Windows (but I heard it also runs under Wine on Linux). For me the licensing cost is well worth it. Sorry if this sounds like advertising, but I have really become a fan and always wonder why not more people use it.

Answer 16

I really like LEd for its layout, where you have your code on one side and the resulting PDF on the other, with the ability of clicking directly in the PDF and get the cursor at the corresponding position in the code (and vice-versa).

Answer 17

LED, Emacs, Vim, BaKoMa TeX and Kile would get my vote. Personally I use the text editor that ships with BaKoMa, I find the visual product OK but you will find yourself jumping in and out of the visual tool and its text source often if you are doing anything half complex.

Answer 18

I used to work with LEd and it was fine. If you're using LaTeX a lot, you won't need those fancy preview options, but you will definitely need a lot of good shortcuts, and as many in-editor macros as possible. See, the problem with LEd was that I used an extreme lot of in-source macros like 'R' for 'mathbb(R)', and after the hundredth macro, no one but me could understand the source, which is definitely not that good. Now I began to use Vim, and it's wicked sick, but I still have to get used to it, and yes, it's not that comfortable for the beginner. But remember: when you first used LaTex, it wasn't comfortable either, now you're addicted to it. Or at least I hope so.

I'm with bkarak. :)

Answer 19

I'm fairly new into the whole LaTeX business, but I have had some good experiences with WinShell, although I'm not quite happy with the code-coloring in the program. It isn't capable of distinguishing anything inside $'s (math-mode or display-mode), and therefore when I type out long equations things can get a bit confusing to look at. I just now switched to TeXnicCenter after looking at what is (currently) the top post, and I must say--I'm quite impressed. I was also giving WinEdt a try, but it doesn't really look to be worth even the 30 dollars that I would have to pay (I'm a student).

I used LyX last semester before I figured out any of the LaTeX business, but I'm not quite sure if I'd really recommend it--it is fine for the casual user, but if you are doing any serious mathematical-typesetting, you are going to want the full power of editors like TeXnicCenter... Maybe some day I will be worthy of giving Vim a try (it has been recommended to me all over the place), but it is still completely unintelligible as of yet

Answer 20

I like to use vim from DOS. I have a batch file for pdflatex.exe in my path. It's not really a frontend, but LaTeX is easy to pick-up. WinEdt, TechnicCenter and a configured TextPad aren't bad, either.

Answer 21

See here for all your "what is the best editor to do $blah" needs.

Answer 22

Depends what other source code you write and under which environments.

I use emacs because it has a mode for editing/running R scripts and I work on Windows and Linux. Emacs looks the same on whatever platform (In the past I have used it on Burroughs mainframes, Prime minicomputers, Sun workstations, Macs and DOS. You don't think OS's will change much in the future?)

If you are writing books then AUCTeX is brilliant. Keeps track of multiple subject, author indices, as well as the figure and table indices with support from the necessary LaTeX packages.

Answer 23

If you are an programmer and familiar with Eclipse environment, I suggest Texplipse because it is so nice and flexible. For instance, you can define auto-completions or auto-corrections. Furthermore, you can control all your documents easily. By using an SVN or CVS repository, more than one person can work on a single Tex file at the same time.

Suggest all to use.

Kind Regards,

FY

Answer 24

You can't beat TeXWorks (cross-platform but inspired by TeXShop for Mac) for simplicity and convenience; has the usual amenities including a built-in PDF viewer; supports synctex (with modern TeX distributions) so you can jump back and forth between arbitrary locations in source and PDF output.

Answer 25

I would recommend TeXnic Center. I used before LED but I realizes it has some bugs. Then, I tried TexMaker which is quite ok, but when it comes to citation then you have to open back the .bib file to copy paste the label and referencing of equations in different section, then you should copy paste as well from the file.

TeXnic has a good navigator toolbar that all the entries of .bib are available, you don't need to save your file, and the toolbar also provide a list of all equations in your document.

may be the only drawbac of TeXnic is it does not have template for bibtex. But this is not a big issue, because it is very easy to learn and master.

M

Answer 26

I used Texmaker and LEd throughout my academic life. Texmaker is very managable and cross platform.

Answer 27

It seems nobody has an answer and realistic comparison. How many of us has time to write down the code for the sake of getting good type setting? Lyx worked well with me. Texnikcenter and winshell will have their advovates. But what I use is LyTex, downloaded from google-code. Have a look.

Answer 28

I just tried (I think) all the commercial ones listed here. I am going to try out TeXnicCenter some more---it seems to be most promising. I intend to come back with some details.

Answer 29

I have tried (I think) all the non-commercial ones listed here. TeXnicCenter seems to be promising. Here are some details:

Texmaker: One little annoyance was that the editor font seems to be fixed to be Courier (I find "Consolas" or "Bitstream vera sans mono" are better). But apart from that it seems to be nice, and I would try it next after TeXnicCenter.

MeWa: (used to be LaTeXEditor) Couldn't find a way to change the editor font from Courier. Also, development seems to have stopped in 2007. Otherwise it seems similar to Texmaker and TeXnicCenter on first inspection.

TexMacs: Gave up on getting this to install properly after some trying. Possibly it isn't really a LaTeX editor, and development seems to have stopped a while ago (possibly in 2003?).

Texlipse: One of the harder one's to install---first you need to install Eclipse and then add texlipse to it. Also the interface has a lot of C/C++ functions in addition to the Texlipse ones, cluttering it somewhat. But I got it to work, and if one is already using Eclipse, it may be the TeX editor of choice.

Led: The version I downloaded turned out to be buggy (its built-in dvi-viewer displayed only a few random dots). I did try a little (including dowloading a dll recommended on the web page) without success.

TeXworks: Actually the first one that I tried (it came with MikTeX). Has one or two annoying features: The font display of the editor on my screen is somehow not clean, and it doesn't have any built in Latex knowledge (for generating (La)TeX commands/symbols with menus/buttons).

LyTeX: This is the heftiest download (99MB) but it contains a full TeX distribution (TeX Live). Maybe one can download it without that and point it to MikTex, but at least that’s not what happened when I did the most direct thing. Has a fancy and possibly quite nice view of the document (half Wysiwig intermixed with collapsable TeX commands). But it couldn't handle my (not overly complicated) Latex source files and I gave up after a while.

LyX: I downloaded the standard Windows installer. It takes quite a while to install (10 minutes on my fast computer letting MikTeX fetch several packages). Then I found out that it is just LyTeX (and still could not TeX my files).

TeXnicCenter: This is the one I am going to try first. It was fairly easy to install, but as for many or most of the other editors, the configuring for the PDF viewer was a little cumbersome. I ended up with a good solution however with SumatraPDF, described here. TeXnicCenter seems to be quite well configurable.

Emacs: I shall not write about that (it may well be the best, but the installation and learning will take some time). Also I might point out that the current TeX distribution that comes with Cygwin seems to be broken.

Scite: This is a general purpose editor (for lots of different (programming) languages) that seems to be quite nice. I didn't however go all the way to set it up for LaTeX use. It seems plausible that it can be set up to behave similarly to TeXwork. Then it will have lots more editing features (regular epressions etc.) but not any built-in LaTeX knowledge

Vim: Yes I tol'd a lie, I didn't try them all

Answer 30

gVim and batch files for automation.

Answer 31

A newcomer: Sublime Text with the LaTeX package available at

http://sublimetextwiki.com/pages/LaTeX.html

Disclosure: I am the author of the package. I would love to get some feedback; you can use the Sublime Text forums (can't post the link yet---I am new to stackoverflow and hence limited to one link per message).

M

Answer 32

I like browser-based LaTeX-Editors such as http://www.verbosus.com They allow me to store and manage my projects at one place (online) and I don't have to install any software to use LaTeX. Since verbosus offers (custom) templates, syntax-highlighting, code completion and HTTPS it gives me all I need...

Answer 33

hello everyone...

all the editors seem to be more or less the same for me... as for viewing the resulting .eps, i strongly recommend using evince for windows..not only is it fast, it automatically updates the created pdf every time it changes, so you can have it open in split screen mode and just compile and evince will display the updated .pdf or .dvi.. have fun with that

Answer 34

WinShell is pretty good. It's free. The developer is always making it better and responds to the questions in the forum pretty quickly. I have been using it for 2 years now. You can compile and view the pdf. When there is an error, it takes you the error number.

Answer 35

Gummi is the best LaTeX editor. It is a free, open source, program written in python, featuring a live preview pane.

http://gummi.midnightcoding.org/

Answer 36

Try Inlage... if you use Windows7: It has Tablet PC support and there are a lot of nice functions for working faster...

http://www.inlage.com

Answer 37

Kile for Linux, TeXShop for Mac, LatexEditor (LEd) and WinEdit for Windows. If you need unicode in Windows, then TeXMaker is a good choice. TexWorks seems promising but has a long way to go. I LOVE Kile, but the windows installation is not that straight forward. So I use LEd in windows, but its problem is that it is not opensource and the developers seem to have planned to make some money out of it at some point and when they did not, they stopped developing it.

Answer 38

I like to use Emacs for editing LaTeX files in windows.

Answer 39

I'll second the choice for Lyx. If you want to write source code or create custom templates this it not the editor for you, but if you don't care about latex and its quirks and just want to write something you can print out or pass to a publisher LyX is a wonderful choice.

Answer 40

HI

I am using TexMaker Version 2.0. I found it quite useful. After reading most of the answers to this question, I am not quite sure which Tex editor is the best for windows.

Is it TexnicCenter or what? Does it worth changing the existing one?

If it is the best one, then I will change Texmaker to that one.