Q&A 008

Alpha Q&A #008

How to use alpha as an external text editor ?

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Question

How to use Alpha as an external text editor ?
Some applications (such as Skim, TeXShop) support external text editors to perform certain tasks. The following subsections explain how this feature can be enabled.

Answer

With Skim

Skim is a PDF viewer which makes synchronization possible between a TeX source file and its pdf output.
You can select Skim as your pdf viewer in Alpha via the Alpha ↣ Global Setup ↣ Helper Applications menu item. Set the viewPDF service in the PDF panel.
To enable TeX synchronization from Skim, open Skim's preferences, select the Sync panel and, in the PDF-TeX Sync Support section, choose Alpha.
Skim Sync Preference

That's all there is to it: Skim is smart and is able to automatically find the alphac script inside Alpha's application bundle.

With TeXShop

TeXShop is a front end to TeX and LaTeX.
You can select TeXShop as your pdf viewer in Alpha via the Alpha ↣ Global Setup ↣ Helper Applications menu item. Set the viewPDF service in the PDF panel.
Starting from version 4.24, TeXShop supports TeX synchronization. It relies for this on a script called othereditor which must be provided by the text editor: starting from version 9.0.4, Alpha provides this script. It is distributed with Alpha's ExtraTools (click here to download the ExtraTools) and is also found inside the application bundle in Alpha.app/Contents/Resources/Libraries/Extras (click here to reveal this directory).
In order to enable this feature, you must perform the following tasks:

configure TeXShop to use an external editor by selecting the Configure for External Editor preference found in the Source panel of the of TeXShop's preferences.
execute the following command from a Terminal window in order to enable synchronization with an external editor:
```
defaults write TeXShop OtherEditorSync YES
```
This is a TeXShop hidden preference and there is currently no other way to set it.
copy the othereditor script to the /usr/local/bin directory. TexShop's internal mechanism expects this script to be named exactly like this and to be located in this directory. Assuming that Alpha is in the /Applications folder, this can be done from a Terminal window with the following command:
```
sudo ditto /Applications/Alpha.app/Contents/Resources/Libraries/Extras/othereditor /usr/local/bin/
```
Alternatively you can make in this directory a soft link called othereditor pointing to the real script. This can be done from a Terminal window with the following command:
```
sudo ln -sf /Applications/Alpha.app/Contents/Resources/Libraries/Extras/othereditor /usr/local/bin/othereditor
```
In both cases, you need admin privileges to do this. Also make sure that the script has the executable bit set:
```
sudo chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/othereditor
```

That's all there is to it. Now, if an error occurs during typesetting, you may click on the Goto Error button of TeXShop's console to go back to the source file in Alpha at the line where the error was encountered.

With Terminal

alphac

The alphac script allows Alpha to serve as the EDITOR or TEXEDIT environment variables to open a file at a given line from the Terminal. In the following instructions, you must replace $APPLICATION by the path of the Alpha application as explained at the beginning of this file.
Setting the environment variable TEXEDIT in a terminal window to

$APPLICATION/Contents/Resources/alphac +%d %s

will make the teTeX versions of tex (and pdftex) use Alpha when "e" is typed at an error prompt.
alphac may also be used as the system editor by setting the EDITOR environment variable to

$APPLICATION/Contents/Resources/alphac -w

The -w option will make alphac wait until you close the window of the edited file, letting the system know that you have finished.
See more information on the alphac help page.

alphaed

In order to quickly edit one or several files with Alpha, you may use the alphaed command. It is distributed with Alpha's ExtraTools (click here to download the ExtraTools). The alphaed script must be found on your PATH. Then you just have to type something like:

alphaed somefile
alphaed file1 file2

See more information on the alphaed help page.