Windows emulator on Linux?

[Balduran]

I have used nedit to write a thesis and half a dozen papers with LaTeX. I love it. Admiteddly though, I have never tried defining any shortcut keys, but I think you can.

Mort, I was trying LyX before and was not very happy with it. First of all, I found it very slow, especially the document preview process. As well, my boss uses a LaTeX editor in windows, thus I had to share the Lyx files with my boss by converting them to Tex. The Lyx format is not Tex, but must be converted. I found the conversion from Lyx to Tex and vice-versa very unstable. That was a year ago, has it improved a lot since then?

[Mort_Furd]

Dunno. I just use the LyX format.

[Balthisar]

Hmmm… VMWare isn’t available for the Macintosh. I don’t know if that’s a “yet,” though. It would be good to have another source of an x86 virtual machine for the Mac, though, since I am a bit paranoid about what Microsoft plans for Virtual PC (a great x86 virtual machine for Mac/Windows but alas no Linux).

Sadly my VMWare demo has expired. I have the choice of saving for my Apple Cinema Display or paying a large amount of money for a virtual machine, so, guess which wins? As for WINE on Linux (I’m running SuSE 8.2) I haven’t had really, really good results with it. To be fair, though, I haven’t invested a lot of time trying to get it to work since VMWare appealed to me so much. I’ve not tried Win4Lin because (1) there’s no demo! and (2) it’s won’t run any NT-based OS.

I guess in my own case I should examine what it is I want to run on Windows that I can’t find an equivilent for on my Mac or in Linux. I guess nothing, really – it’s just a security blanket I’ve not let go of.

[Mort_Furd]

*Originally posted by Balduran *
]Mort, I was trying LyX before and was not very happy with it. First of all, I found it very slow, especially the document preview process. As well, my boss uses a LaTeX editor in windows, thus I had to share the Lyx files with my boss by converting them to Tex. The Lyx format is not Tex, but must be converted. I found the conversion from Lyx to Tex and vice-versa very unstable. That was a year ago, has it improved a lot since then?

On thinking about it, it seems to me that the Tex ouput has to work fairly well. The normal print sequence goes like this: Lyx format to LaTex format to DVI to postscript to the printer. The conversion has to work well, or else things wouldn’t print right.

[Mr.Feely]

*Originally posted by Hari Seldon *
The main thing I use it for is to prepare documents in TeX, the mathematical markup language. This is made for every computer and OS I am aware of, but does not come with a standard editor. I have made kedit into an editor optimized for preparing TeX documents. For example, when I press F10, it lays down a pair of dollar signs and backspaces so the cursor is between them. F11 and F12 do the same for pairs of braces and parentheses, resp. C-b prompts me an environment name and lays down a \begin…\end pair. And so on. I spent over an hour trying to do the first of these with THE, to no avail.

If you have the desire, you might consider switching to the Emacs or XEmacs editor (I prefer XEmacs myself; it’s easier on the eyes). It’s fully programmable in Lisp, so it shoud be able to do anything you were doing in your previous editor. It also provides a mode for TeX/LaTeX documents, with syntax highlighting and customized commands, so at least some of what you’ve done is already built-in. There is definitely a learning curve though, and you’ll have to learn new keystrokes, but it does come with plenty of documentation.

For example, the following code can be inserted into your ~/.xemacs/init.el file to program XEmacs with the settings you specified:

(defun insert-math ()
(interactive)
(insert “$$”)
(backward-char))

(add-hook 'tex-mode-hook
(lambda ()
(define-key tex-mode-map [(f10)] 'insert-math)
(define-key tex-mode-map [(f11)] 'tex-insert-braces)
(define-key tex-mode-map [(f12)] 'insert-parentheses)
(define-key tex-mode-map [(control c) (b)] 'tex-latex-block)))

(This actually binds the begin/end pair insert to control-c b, rather than control-b, which is a basic cursor motion key in emacs. By default, it’s actually bound to control-c control-o, but I figured control-c b is a bit closer to what you’re currently using.)

I wrote my masters thesis in LaTeX in XEmacs, so I can vouch for its usefulness.

[Hari_Seldon]

Yeah well, after you have used one editor for 18 years, you get used to it. I am not about to learn Lisp. Emacs and I do not get along. After I switched from Solaris to Linux on my office machine some years ago (switched from a Sun to an Intel box, to be precise) and copied my .emacsrc from one to the other, I discovered it no longer line-wrapped. Several days later, after trying a number of possibilities and reading whatever help files there were, I had still not succeeded in making lines wrap. I decided that any editor that made such an obvious feature so difficult to implement is just not for me. Someone is sure to answer by telling me how to do it, but that misses the whole point. There is no simple way to do anything in emacs.

The whole discussion is moot. Thanks to some excellent suggestions from members of this board, but especially mort furd (by email), I have now successfully installed wine and got kedit working smoothly and I thank you all.