Latex Editors: WinEdt versus TeXstudio

For more years than I care to remember I have been using WinEdt as my latex editor and, to be honest, I quite like it. It does what it says on the tin. Sometimes, it required 2-3 compiles, along with 2-3 bibliography compiles. Actually, that may not be true but I got into the habit of doing that as somebody (many years ago) told me you had to.

Recently, following a discussion with a final year undergraduate student, where I had persuaded him to change from Word to Latex (something I wish I had done during my PhD). A few days after our discussion he told me, and after consulting with his friends, that he had decided to take the plunge.

He later told me that he was using TeXStudio. I had not come across this before but I thought I would take a look. I had recently downloaded the latest version of WinEdt and, although I had bought a license for the previous version, once the trial time was up on the new version (version 7), I would have to buy a new license. This is fine, but TexStudio is free.

I am actually very impressed with TexStudio. I have not investigated all of its functionality yet (and to be fair, nor have I with WinEdt) but I like the fact that when you compile, the PDF is shown within the application, and opening the PDF file in another application is just one click away. I also like the fact that when you compile it seems to resolve everything in one pass. In WinEdt, it is possible to get question marks where the citations should appear as you needed to compile the bibliography.

Overall, I like the look/feel of TexStudio more than WinEdt and it is free to use, so I think I’ll stick with it for now.

It would be interesting to hear if anybody has a different view, or even an opposite view to mine?