Hullo scientists, fellow researcher here with a question for peers:
Do you have any suggestions for closed-off writing software (no AI scraping, no school oversight, no cloud storage with mysterious and unknown security). As we are all aware, formatting an article can take as much effort as writing the damn thing some days, especially if you do not want to use Microsoft or Google for ethical and privacy reasons.
My peers and I work with a lot of students who want to study and work with vulnerable populations, the sort of populations that some companies and (shameful) universities are attempting to delete evidence of. I am attempting to address some concerns coming up in the classroom without putting my career at risk. What better way than with a lesson and a resource list for secure writing and storage tips?
The school doesn’t pay for a Microsoft license, and some students have expressed feeling unsafe and uncomfortable supporting google. I have suggested Libreoffice as its what I use but some of the students are really struggling with formatting their papers to academic standards in this software. Admittedly, I agree, Libre takes 7-14 steps to do some things google can do in two clicks. I would like to look into alternatives.
Most of the writing applications I’m seeing both free and paid tend to be for creative writers or note taking and I am not seeing tools to make running titles or easily format your sources.
What are you all using, do you have recommendations? I
Any recommendations?
For a powerful and resilient LaTeX experience, having used many editors and IDEs, I really feel nothing comes close to a properly configured Emacs with the right packages installed (there are various blogposts and walkthroughs online for that).
Overleaf, Typst
TeXStudio if you want something that is easy to set up. VSCode + LaTeX Workshop if you need features from VSCode (other extensions, git integration,…).
Note that you still have to bring your own LaTeX installation (I always use TeXLive, but there are other options)
For literature I’ve found Zotero + BetterBibTeX plugin very nice, otherwise JabRef also exists but is much more “raw”.
I wrote my MSc. thesis using Texmaker, and I’ve dabbled a bit with TeXstudio. I’m partial to Texmaker simply because of how easy it was to integrate bibliography and dictionaries, spin up code snippets/templates, customize build flows, debug errors, and embed different image types.
You can experiment with a few editors if you like. Ultimately, it’s the one that you feel most comfortable that will work best because the code is the same.