TeXing on the Mini

I can hardly believe it myself, but I'm actually working with the Mini. 😊 Work, in my case, most often means punching in some text in a LaTeX environment and compiling it from time to time, so that the result is visible with a pdf viewer.

My main machine runs KDE, so the natural choice for a LaTeX-IDE is Kile. That's, of course, out of the question for the Mini with its 8 GB SSD (and running Gnome 😄 ). Of course, in this case emacs and auctex comes to mind, as well as vim and its LaTeX plugin. Well, the former is big, complex, and in general only suited to emacs lovers. The latter is awkward, clumsy, and, unfortunately, hopelessly outdated. I also don't need the power of emacs or vim when writing a text. I'm just typing, ok?

What to do, then? Well, there's an amazingly good LaTeX plugin for gedit which is doing just what I need. After installing it (wajig install gedit-latex-plugin), gedit sports a LaTeX menu when loading a TeX file. Just type ahead! A Ctrl-Alt-1 will compile the text using pdfTeX and open your default pdf viewer (in this case, evince) to view the result. The compiler activity is indicated graphically, a summary of messages is displayed, and you can always look into the details one window down. It's damn near perfect.