Fear and computing
So, working on my CSC 300 paper last night, I got royally pissed off at Microsoft Word for deciding that half a page is too much text, and making up new rules for when to wrap text to the next page and decided to learn TeX.
Let me tell you, you don't know fear like the fear of a computer programmer trying to look up tutorials for LaTeX.
It seems to be going alright so far, but I'm really disappointed in trying to use emacs with TeX. I'm normally a vi guy, personally, but I figured given how non-trivial a 20 page paper is, I'd use a text editor that is supposed to be awesome for that sort of thing.
What follows is really more or less me complaining about applications more than I'd like. If you're into stuff like emacs, read and tell me what I'm doing wrong; then you'll be awesome. I'm trying to be constructive, but I'm not sure how it's coming off.
So how is it I can't figure out how to get spell checking working. Specifically, I'd LOVE the on the fly spell checking that TextEdit for the mac does. If I could get that working, I'd take back everything bad I ever said about emacs users. I mean, the app has a freakin' psychologist, why can't it have technology in one of the simplest apps on OS X? The carbon version of emacs says it can do spelling inline, but wants some ispell file it can't find. I'm looking that up now, but haven't found anything yet. (Fred, do you know?)
While I'm moaning about emacs, WTF is up with it and vis inability to handle navigating long words? That is, it wraps words for me, but if I arrow, I skip that whole long line. Feh, so now I have to insert returns all over the place that makes it difficult to import in any 'real' text editor? Gamecat, I remember seeing you complain about this; did you ever figure out a solution?
I'm using iTeXMac right now, which is pretty lame. It does the job (has spell check, lets me compile my paper on the fly, etc), though it's PDF viewer is a flaming POS and it's text editor has issues with copy paste and word wrap. I wish I would get the energy to try and have it use Preview instead of its built in PDF viewer.
Overall TeX seems kinda cool, though I'm worried; the default margins look really big, but make my paper oh-so-long. Alas.
Let me tell you, you don't know fear like the fear of a computer programmer trying to look up tutorials for LaTeX.
It seems to be going alright so far, but I'm really disappointed in trying to use emacs with TeX. I'm normally a vi guy, personally, but I figured given how non-trivial a 20 page paper is, I'd use a text editor that is supposed to be awesome for that sort of thing.
What follows is really more or less me complaining about applications more than I'd like. If you're into stuff like emacs, read and tell me what I'm doing wrong; then you'll be awesome. I'm trying to be constructive, but I'm not sure how it's coming off.
So how is it I can't figure out how to get spell checking working. Specifically, I'd LOVE the on the fly spell checking that TextEdit for the mac does. If I could get that working, I'd take back everything bad I ever said about emacs users. I mean, the app has a freakin' psychologist, why can't it have technology in one of the simplest apps on OS X? The carbon version of emacs says it can do spelling inline, but wants some ispell file it can't find. I'm looking that up now, but haven't found anything yet. (Fred, do you know?)
While I'm moaning about emacs, WTF is up with it and vis inability to handle navigating long words? That is, it wraps words for me, but if I arrow, I skip that whole long line. Feh, so now I have to insert returns all over the place that makes it difficult to import in any 'real' text editor? Gamecat, I remember seeing you complain about this; did you ever figure out a solution?
I'm using iTeXMac right now, which is pretty lame. It does the job (has spell check, lets me compile my paper on the fly, etc), though it's PDF viewer is a flaming POS and it's text editor has issues with copy paste and word wrap. I wish I would get the energy to try and have it use Preview instead of its built in PDF viewer.
Overall TeX seems kinda cool, though I'm worried; the default margins look really big, but make my paper oh-so-long. Alas.