Latex front-end for Gnome?

[Dustpuppy]

I've finally snapped over XP on my desktop and am going to put a Mandrake partition on it as the primary OS, keeping M$ for games. However, my main concern is finding a suitable LaTex front-end (I'm currently writing up my PhD so this is THE main concern!). I've got 9.2 on my laptop and run Kile when I need to, but I can't get anything other than the 'quickbuild' to work, which is fine for small files, but not for a 100,000 word thesis! I use WinEdt on XP, which is fab, but I'd love not to have to boot into Windows whenever I need to work, SO... is there a good LaTex front-end for Gnome (I prefer it to KDE), on a par (ish) with WinEdt, that can handle large files?

 

NB having perused these forums I'll be installing 9.2 rather than 10 B)

[coverup]

You can try TeXmacs, it's available from Mandrake contrib sites. Having said that, I recommend to use Emacs/Xemacs for serious work.

[coverup]

Forgot to mention LyX, not sure though whether it is suitable for larde docs.

[Dustpuppy]

Thanks, coverup, I've had a look at Lyx and Texmacs, but they both seem to be WYSIWYG, which isn't really what I want. I can code easily in LaTex, I just want a nice program that puts everything (dvi, ps, bib) together, like WinEdt/Kile.

[coverup]

Then your best bet is emacs + auctex + reftex. Emacs is easily configurable, you can easily add a menu that will allow compiling tex/latex files, viewing dvi, running bibtex, pdftex, dvips, ps2pdf, etc. Auctex provides a set of macros that take care of adding eqnarrays, floats, font highlighting, reftex makes including references and citations very easy. Also, emacs spellchecker ispell is latex-aware, it won't curse you over each and every \ref and \eqnarray. Plus lots of other features, such as search/replace accross multiple documents (comes handy, if you treat chapters as separate latex files).

 

All these goodies come with Mandrake, but you may need to install them - Mandrake's software choice is somewhat specific :D.

 

Xemacs should provide the same functionality, though I prefer emacs.

[Dustpuppy]

Thanks!

 

Actually, I've just realised where I was going wrong with Kile, so I'll have another bash at that... if it doesn't work out, I'll try your suggestion. Many thanks for you help!

[Qchem]

I use LaTeX a lot for producing journal articles and the best solution I've found (for me obviously) is to have two terminals open, one large terminal with emacs editing the TeX and a second smaller terminal to run LaTeX and xdvi. Using the up key in the second terminal will go through the history so the commands only need to be typed once for each session. I've never been a big fan of the IDE style environments (for programming or TeX).

[coverup]

Here is a piece of my .emacs file. If you have the auctex and reftex packages installed, including this code in .emacs file should add Command and Ref to the emacs pulldown menu. Like Qchem, I have the dvi file open in xdvi or kdvi. However, I run LaTeX within emacs using the pulldown menu (of course, you can run latex using an emacs minibufer command if you like). This makes locating a problem as easy as pressing C-`.

 

(require 'tex-site)
(require 'font-latex)  

;; The 'TeX-command-list' (pull-down menu at the top of emacs appearing when 
;; emacs is in TeX major mode) consists of the options below.
;; Invoking 'C-c C-c' in a TeX major mode will run the "LaTeX" command
;; of the command list. (After compiling, errors can be retrieved by
;; invoking 'C-c `' (Control-c accent-gr\`ave).
;; If no errors occur and if all cross-references are known, a second
;; 'C-c C-c' will run the 'View' command of the list.

;; First customize the printer list
(defvar TeX-printer-list
 '(("Default" "dvips %s" "lpq")
   ("printer_at_home") ("printer_at_work")
;; Expand the list if you want to
))

;; Set up default printer
(defvar TeX-printer-default (or (getenv "PRINTER")
      (and TeX-printer-list
  	 (car (car TeX-printer-list)))
      "printer_at_work"))

(defvar TeX-command-list 
 (list(list "LaTeX" "latex '\\nonstopmode\\input{%t}'" 
               'TeX-run-LaTeX nil t)
      (list "PDFLaTeX" "pdflatex '\\nonstopmode\\input{%t}'" 
               'TeX-run-command nil t) 
      (list "View" "xdvi -s 5 %s" 'TeX-run-command t nil)
      (list "dviPS to file" "dvips -Pcmz %d -o %f" 
             'TeX-run-command nil t) 
      (list "Ghostview" "ghostview %f" 
             'TeX-run-command nil t) 
      (list "Convert to pdf using ghostscript" "ps2pdf %f" 
             'TeX-run-command nil t) 
      (list "Print" "%p " 'TeX-run-command t nil)
      (list "Queue" "%q" 'TeX-run-background nil nil)
      (list "BibTeX" "bibtex %s" 'TeX-run-BibTeX nil nil) 
      (list "Index" "makeindex %s" 'TeX-run-command nil t) 
      (list "Check" "lacheck %s" 'TeX-run-compile nil t)
      (list "Other" "" 'TeX-run-command t t)
))

;; Add RefTeX mode

(add-hook 'LaTeX-mode-hook 'turn-on-reftex)  ; with AUCTeX LaTeX mode
(add-hook 'latex-mode-hook 'turn-on-reftex)  ; with Emacs latex mode      

[neutro]

I'm not sure what your problem with Kile is, but IMHO, it's really the best tool out there as for a LaTeX frontend editor.