Customizing T_EXworks

A.1 Syntax highlighting

Among its many other features, T_EXworks also include syntax highlighting. This means that certain things like LaTeX commands, environments, or comments are coloured, underlined, or highlighted in some other way. T_EXworks also provides the ability to switch between different highlighting schemes¹, and to define your own ones. This is useful if you often work with types of files for which no highlighting scheme is provided by default, or if you want to adjust the highlighting schemes to better match your system’s colour scheme.

To modify the highlighting schemes, you have to edit the plain-text file <resources>/configuration/syntax-patterns.txt. This file can contain any number of individual sections, each defining a single highlighting scheme to be displayed in the menu structure of T_EXworks. To define a section, just write the name enclosed in square brackets on a line of its own. Naturally, these names should not include the ] character. By default, the following two sections are defined:

[LaTeX] 
[ConTeXt]

In addition, you can add comments to the file by starting a line with #. Empty lines are ignored.

Each section consists of an arbitrary number of styling rules. Each such instruction consists of three parts: a formatting instruction, a spell-check flag, and a regular expression² defining what part of a text to match. These parts must all be on the same line, and separated by whitespaces (e.g., spaces or tabstop characters). Take for example the following line from the default LaTeX section:

red    Y    %.*

The first part, red, defines the format (in this case, a red foreground colour is specified). The second part, Y, defines that spellchecking should be enabled for text that matches this particular rule. Sometimes, it is useful to put N here to disable spellchecking. For example, if spellchecking would be enabled for LaTeX commands, most documents would be flooded with red underlines indicating misspelled words when in fact they are only special commands. Finally, the third part specifies that this rule should be applied to all text preceded by %.

Let us take a closer look at the three parts of each rule. In its most general form, the first part—the format instruction—looks like

<foreground_colour>/<background_colour>;<fontflags>

The <fontflags> can be specified independent of the colours (note, though, that it must always be preceded by a ;). The background colour (together with the /) can be omitted, but if you specify it, you also have to specify the foreground colour.

Each colour can either be specified by an SVG name³ or by a hexadecimal value (#rrggbb⁴) similar as in web documents. The <fontflags> can be any combination of the letter B (bold), I (italic), and U (underlined).

Examples of valid formatting instructions are:

red 
white/#000000 
;B 
blue;I 
 #000000/#ffff00;U

A.2 Keyboard shortcuts

The use of keyboard shortcuts greatly facilitates typing in and the management of the source and the preview windows. Their use is much more effective than the use of buttons for frequently-used actions.

Below, you’ll find the shortcuts for source and preview windows. Note that on macOS, Ctrl actually refers to the Command key, which is the usual modifier for keyboard shortcuts. Although the keyboard shortcuts are specified with Ctrl, this will appear as the Command-key symbol in menus. (To refer to the actual Control key on the Mac, the shortcut file should use the name Meta).

Note that the shortcuts listed below are the default shortcuts for the English interface of T_EXworks. Different languages may use different shortcuts.

All the shortcuts can be redefined either to create new shortcuts or to modify the existing ones to match personal uses or change shortcuts not adapted to one particular keyboard layout. The list of possible actions to associate with shortcuts is given after the predefined shortcuts.

To define your own shortcuts, put a file named shortcuts.ini in the <resources>/configuration folder, next to auto-indent-patterns.txt, delimiter-pairs.txt, …, texworks-config.txt.

For example, this file could contain:

actionHard_Wrap = Shift+F3 
actionLast_Page = Ctrl+End 
actionFirst_Page = Ctrl+Home 
actionWrap_Lines = F3 
actionLine_Numbers = F4 
actionBalance_Delimiters = F9

The first line defines that using Shift ⇑F3 should open the hardwrap dialogue box in the source window; the second (CtrlEnd) should bring you to the last page and CtrlHome (third line) should take you to the first page; with F3 you want to wrap/unwrap lines in the source, with F4 you will show/hide line numbers and with F9 you intend to select the text between corresponding delimiters in the source.

A.2.1 Predefined shortcuts

For working in the source window:

Moving the cursor (hold Shift ⇑ to select):

For working in the preview window:

A.2.2 Actions listed alphabetically

A.2.3 Actions listed by menu

For the source window:

For the preview window:

A.2.4 Actions for typesetting tools

In addition to the static actions listed above, there are also actions for switching to a typesetting tool. All of these actions are of the general form actionTypesetTool<tool_name> where <tool_name> must be replaced appropriately. For example, the name corresponding to the pdfLaTeX typesetting tool is actionTypesetToolpdfLaTeX, that corresponding to My␣tool is actionTypesetToolMy␣tool.⁵

A.2.5 Actions for scripts

There are also actions for scripts. These are dynamic in nature, as they are created on-the-fly for the available scripts (which may change when you install scripts, remove them, or change some settings). All of these actions are of the form Script:␣<script_title>, where <script_title> must be replaced appropriately. If you have a script that shows up as My Script, for example, the corresponding action would be named Script:␣My␣Script.

A.3 Roots for completion

We give here the keywords for auto-completion as they are supplied by T_EXworks. They are given in the files tw-basic.txt, tw-context.txt (initially empty) and tw-latex.txt in the <resource>\completion folder.

We give them in three columns: the first two show the keywords, the third the (L^A)T_EX code produced. In some cases there is only the code, this means that you can start to enter the (L^A)T_EX code and try to complete it with ⇆.

During completion, the system inserts line feeds and puts the cursor at the first place where one has to enter information to complete the typing. To represent the line feeds we used R and I for the input point.

So, a line like “\begin{abstract}RIR\end{abstract}∙” should be interpreted as

\begin{abstract} 
 
\end{abstract}∙

with the cursor being position on the central, empty line.

It is possible to see that the keywords have some pattern. The mathematical variables have a keyword starting with x, when they are in a mathematical environment; when they are used alone in the text you add d in front. For example, xa and dxa give \alpha, if there is a capital there is a c, as xo for \omega and xco for \Omega. The keywords for environments start with b: bali for \begin{align} (b is a mnemonic for \begin). When the environment has possible options, there is one or more o added to the base name: bminp gives \begin{minipage}{}... while bminpo gives \begin{minipage}[]{}....

Keywords defined in tw-basic.txt (defined in T_EX):

Keywords defined in tw-latex.txt (defined in LaTeX):

Keywords defined in tw-latex-pkg.txt (defined by various packages):

Keywords defined in tw-beamer.txt (defined by the beamer package):

Keywords defined in tw-context.txt (defined in ConT_EXt):

There are also environment codes (above) without \begin{ (which is itself a keyword); this allows to finish the environment name alone by ⇆ if one started to input it manually.