AUCTeX - Another geeky post

This one is for anyone who uses Emacs and Latex to write papers. On and off for a few years, a colleague of mine touted the wonders of AUCTeX. He said that it would save me oodles of time. Not unlike my initial reaction to Xfig, I dismissed AUCTeX as not being worth the effort to learn how to use. I was wrong. I started using it seven and a half months ago, and I love it. It has saved me oodles of time, and it adds an element of fun to writing papers which is always welcome.

Thanks to AUCTeX, I no longer need to interrupt the flow of writing to enter "latex my-paper.tex" in a terminal window. C-c C-c runs latex right from Emacs. It also keeps track of the state of the document. In other words, the first time you type C-c C-c it runs latex. The mini-buffer will then tell you to do it again if you need to run BibTeX to get your citations right. It will then keep telling you to do it again to run latex to get the references right. When all references are in order and you haven't made any changes since the last latexing, C-c C-c starts up an external viewer so that you can view the dvi file (or the PDF if you're running it in pdfmode - yes, it can run pdflatex instead of latex if you want it to).

Try it. It's great.